So what do I have? What are the resources I am working from.? As you will see, it is hard to decide what order to introduce them in. Some have great significance because of their originality. Some may have even greater significance because they provide structure and background.
The Letters
We have 100s of letters. Some from the 1860s, as I am starting with here and many more from 1890s. They are just family letters. My limited experience with this medium is that most of the content is banal. Who is sick, who has died, what did the minister say. It is much more interesting to me when events of the times are mentioned and one gets more of a view into the writer’s view of the world. The letters are all in script. Some of the writers penmanship is better than others. Some of the letters are better preserved than others as far as fading is concerned.
Bible and Pictures
My grandfather, TCP2, saved the “record pages” out of maybe 2 Fahnestock family bibles and we have those. They record births, deaths, marriages. We have some loose unannotated images and one photo album from 1864 with at least minimal identification of each image. We have two 3×4 foot oil portraits of a Fahnestock couple, man and wife. We have at least 3 100 page plus diaries from the 1860? My daughter transcribed and wrote about one of them for a history paper senior year in high school. I think they are all three by my Great Great Grandmother, Sarah Fanhestock.
Ancestry.com
The Ancestry.com material is almost infinite. At least 3 other ancestry members have created reasonably accurate Fahnestock trees. Certainly the birth, marriage and death records here are invaluable. I also learn a great deal from the census records, town directories and international ship passenger lists.
It is very reasonable to ask, why not just store any material you have in Ancestry.com? A very fair comment. Not clear that this is the correct answer. We will see. I always do things like this out of my own enjoyment of the task rather than any true conviction that I am creating value. I hope I can curate some of the material in a way that makes it more accessible to readers who are not Ancentry.com experts.
THE FAHNESTOCK GENEALOGY
You will see a couple pastes from THE FAHNESTOCK GENEALOGY on this site. The full title is THE FAHNESTOCK GENEALOGY Ancestors and Descendants of JOHANN DIEDRICH FAHNESTOCK. The author is H. MINOT PITMAN. It was PRIVATELY PRINTED in 1945 and Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018. They give the URL as
https://archive.org/details/fahnestockgenealOOpitm. I could not get that one to work but the below does:
https://archive.org/details/fahnestockgeneal00pitm/page/n3/mode/2up
They will ask you to donate and you can but if you scroll down further on the page I was able to download a PDF of the entire book. On page 195 my father gets mentioned as being born and my grandfather is given credit as the reference for the Pears decedents. The key to working in any genealogy like this is the numbers. The first person is numbered 1 and his children 2,3 etc. My Great Grandmother is #244. Her father is #108 and in that #108 writeup Sarah’s diary is mentioned and my grandfather is again given reference credit. In our achieves we have a letter from the author, Mr Pitman, saying that he is working on the genealogy and asking for input.