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Joseph Ranney Gravestone

10/25/2018

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    So earlier this year I decided to research the “residents” of the old Presbyterian Church graveyard in Fish House.  This time I chose the grave of Joseph Ranney.  He died on July 18, 1823.  His gravestone is the only Ranney gravestone in that cemetery, so I was curious as to why.   Joseph died at the age of 25, not enough time to really make his mark on the world.  So I decided to go back a generation or two.  Joseph’s father was Hezekiah Ranney Jr., he was born in Connecticut.  Joseph’s grandfather was Hezekiah Ranney Sr., also born in Connecticut.  So how and why did Joseph end up in Fish House, New York?    Be patient as I go back a couple of generations.
   Joseph’s grandfather, Hezekiah Ranney Sr. was born in 1742, he married Lucretia Hartshorn  and they had 7 children from 1766 to 1780.  Lucretia died in 1784.  Hezekiah Ranney Jr., was the fourth born of their seven children.   Hezekiah Ranney Sr. then married a widow, named Martha Stocking.  They had one child, David, born in 1787.  Martha was the widow of Captain John Stocking.  All these names are prominent names of Middletown, Connecticut.  Here my research gets a little murky.  Certain records have Martha dying in 1790.   But then I came across a wonderful article written  by Diana Ross McCain for The Hartford Courant on November 4, 1998.  It was titled: “An Old Fascination With Sensational Crime News” The article was about stories found in Middletown ,Connecticut’s first newspaper, the Middlesex Gazette,


     “There were occasional brief notices of the marriages and deaths of prominent local people, and every so often an item that served up a little slice of life, such as the advertisement placed by Hezekiah Ranney of Middletown on Nov. 3, 1797, that, "Whereas, I . . . am about to move out of this state, and my wife Martha having absolutely refused to accompany me, although she has been often urged and requested thereto -- This is therefore to forbid all persons trusting her on my account as I will not pay any debt of her contracting after this date.”


   So this looks like Hezekiah Ranney Sr. was trying to divorce himself from his second wife.  That would fit with the marriage dates of Hezekiah Ranney Sr. to his THIRD wife, Ann Wright Sage ( another widow) in 1798.  Ann Sage had married Giles Sage and they had 8 children in eleven years, from 1785 to 1796, the year that Giles Sage died.  Two years later Ann Sage married Hezekiah Ranney Sr.  He had inherited the family homestead from his grandfather, Captain Joseph Ranney and he sold it so he could move to New York. * He and Ann moved to Edinburg,New York and had two children.  Hezekiah Ranney Sr. died in 1826, in Edinburg, New York.  His wife, Ann, went to live with her son, Orrin Sage, in Rochester, New York.


     Hezekiah Ranney Jr., Joseph’s father, was born in Connecticut in 1774.  He married Mary Richardson in 1797.  They had six children. The first two, Jabez and Roland were born in Connecticut.  Joseph was the third, but I am not sure if he was born in Connecticut.  Then, Elizabeth (known as Eliza)  was born in 1801 in Saratoga County. She only lived until the age of three and is buried on Sinclair Point, in the Partridge Cemetery, which is near where Hezekiah Ranney Sr. lived in 1804.   Records show that Hezekiah Ranney Jr was living in Edinburg at that time.  Perhaps he was living  with his father but I have yet to find any proof.
      Eventually Hezekiah Ranney Jr. and Mary relocated to Rochester, N.Y.  and then to Geneseo, NY.*  where they both died in1857 and are buried in Temple Hill Cemetery in  Geneseo.  Their oldest son, Jabez, is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY.  Their second son, Roland, died in 1856 and was buried at sea.  So why is Joseph buried here in Fish House? Perhaps Joseph was visiting his grandfather, Hezekiah Ranney Sr. at the time of his death.  If so, why didn’t his grandfather bury Joseph in the Partridge Cemetery next to his sister, Eliza?  Another question, where is Hezekiah Ranney Sr.’s grave? There are some things, as an historian, I might never be able to discover. 
    
* Middletown Upper Houses: A History of The North Society of Middletown

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Osborn(e) Gravestones

10/13/2018

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     My goal, this past spring, was to research as many of the gravestones as I could that are in the old Presbyterian Church graveyard.  One of my research tools is the extensive website that Pete Shew has constructed.  It was with dismay that I discovered that that website was unavailable.  It had been "down" for several months.    Just recently it is now up and running.  Even with Pete Shew's website and with my access to ancestry.com. I have only found out information about a small number of the graveyard "residents".  I learned all about George Osborn and that information was made public on my Facebook page in June of this year.  But I wondered why that was the only Osborn gravestone in that cemetery.  Where were the other family members buried?  So I did research on George's wife, Mary Anne Paul Osborne.  Please note: the Osborn spelling sometimes has an e on the end, and sometimes not.  Many times it is due to a hastily scrawled name on a census form.
     George was listed as a farmer on an 1850 census.  His farm was near the vicinity of Osborn's Bridge (now underwater).  I have not been able to connect George to the original Osborn's Bridge settlers,,,perhaps cousins, perhaps not.  George died at the young age of 38, Mary was left to raise four children, all under the age of ten.  She continued to stay on the farm until after 1860.  The 1865 census has her living in Johnstown with her three daughters.  The son, Robert, would have been around 14 at the time, if he was still alive.  But he was not on the census.
       Doing more research on Mary Paul Osborne I discovered that she ended up in Nebraska!  What would have motivated her to move all the way out there?  My guess is that it was due to the Homestead Act of 1862.  Nebraska allowed women to own land for free. Much of the Nebraska Territory was populated due to that Homestead Act.
    As far as I can tell, Mary brought her children with her to Nebraska.  Her oldest daughter, Lucy, died in 1929 Missouri.  I have not found any information  of the other three.  Did Mary continue to farm?  I do not know.   She never remarried.  She died at the age of 62 and is buried in Cairo, Nebraska.
​      It is so easy to just look at birth dates and death dates when doing ancestry research.  But when I start to delve into people's lives, I start to realize the challenges that people faced.  What an amazingly strong and brave woman Mary Paul Osborne had to have been.  The inscription on her gravestone is from a hymn.  There Are No Partings in Heaven.
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    In 2009, I prepared the first Historical Tour of Fish House. As a result of my work and interest, the Historian of Northampton made me Deputy Historian, concentrating on Fish House which is part of Northampton.

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