My name is Thomas Clinton Pears IV. My father’s name was Thomas Clinton Pears III. My grandfather’s name was Thomas Clinton Pears Jr. and as you might guess, his father’s name was Thomas Clinton Pears. We refer to these guys as TCP 1 2 3 4.
TCP 1 married Ada Fahnestock. She was the mother of TCP2. She gets a bad rap in the family as she may have given away a lot of the inventory of Bakewell Pears Glass that came to her home after her husband closed the family firm in 1892. But she also stole a lot of the great historical documents of her family, the Fahnestocks.
The goal of this site is to start to present some of that material. Lots of it is available in Ancesrty.com in a public tree. If you have an ancestry.com login, you might be able to look at https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/tree/179104319. If any problems, just contact me at tpears AT aol.com where obviously AT is @ and you should put Fahnestock in the subject line. Send another email if I don’t respond quickly. The reason is that you just got lost in the trash, not that I am unwilling to share.
I have struggled a little with how to organize this material. I think the most interesting pages are the ones that transcribe the two letters. But from a visual point of view, they are the least interesting. To me, the pictures of the letters are very intriguing but of course they are almost impossible to read! So, at present, I have the compromise of allowing the reader to go to the letters fairly quickly or the transcripts. Then I try to build a little mystery around who the people are. I am writing this in December of 2021. I have been playing in this sand box for a couple months. I think in the next days I will move on to another sandbox and maybe come back to this one in months or years. I love working with this kind of material and I have an entire mancave full of it, think of the back room of an historical society. However, I’m getting old and my children are correctly after me to stop playing in one sand box and instead work on larger organizational projects so they will be better able to handle the material once I am gone.