Relics – Imagining My Recent Ancestors and Other Kin Using the Traces They Left Behind is published as a large-format paperback (8½ x 11), printed on bright white paper with over 200 photos and illustrations in color and monochrome. Centered in Farmington, Maine, and surrounding towns of Mercer, New Sharon, New Vineyard, Phillips, and Wilton, but also bringing in relatives from other states, the surnames that appear in this book include Belcher, Butler, Crosby, Dershem (Ohio), Gardner (Pennsylvania), Gay, Gilman, Hines, Jensen, Kinney, Knowlton, Miller (Virginia and Ohio), Porter, Ranger, Rutledge (Vermont), Sunderland (Ohio), Sweet, Tufts (New Hampshire), Whipple (Rhode Island), and of course Woodbury.
While it is available to anyone, Relics will be of interest chiefly to descendants of Kate (Gardner) Miller of Black Lick, Pennsylvania, James Milton Dershem of Lima, Ohio, Goldie (Sweet) Jensen of Farmington, Maine, and George Hugh Woodbury of Belgrade, Maine. Those descendants include my parents, Dorothy (Miller) Woodbury and Victor Walter Woodbury as well as their parents as well, therefore all my siblings and first cousins and their descendants.
The Book, by David A. Woodbury
Born and raised deep in the woods of western Maine, Goldie Sweet (1882-1969) was an only child, as was her daughter, Clarice Hines (1903-1969). Goldie inherited an accumulation of documents, photographs, and keepsakes from her ancestors and near relatives. Clarice added her own clutter of letters, post cards, pictures, certificates, and newspaper clippings, and when they both died within months of one another, Clarice’s son, Victor Woodbury (1927-1998), who happened to be my father, was appointed executor of their estates.
RELICS: CONTENTS BY CHAPTER IN PDF
- Prologue
- Fading Photographs
- Peter Spencer Sunderland
- Kate Gardner’s Diary
- Henry Tufts, Jr.
- Mary Jane, Mary Jane
- Eliza’s Poem
- Everett Hugh Woodbury
- Victor in Antarctica
- Woody – (a very large PDF file)
- Woody, a parting tribute (excerpt from above)
- Fly Rod Crosby
- A CARD
- The Farmington Militia
- Loose Ends
- Afterword
Published in large format (8½ x 11) paperback, printed on bright paper with over 200 photos and illustrations in color and monochrome, RELICS is available at Amazon.com for $33 or less (discounts may apply). Since it is so profusely illustrated, a Kindle edition is not practical. Use the table of contents above to view each chapter on line, or for a 350MB PDF download of the whole book at no charge, viewable only on a computer, contact the author.
My parents added to the inventory, of course — my mother, née Dorothy Miller, bringing in only a few things from her Ohio side of the family but most significantly, her grandmother’s 1884 diary, from the year of her twentieth birthday. It’s trite, to glance at a random page, and what could it possibly contain of any consequence? Well, it did contain something…
Before he died Dad (Victor) conveyed several cartons of things to me “for safe keeping.” All too soon after those boxes were stored in my home he died. Dad recognized not so much that there were stories to be told from his multi-generational hoard but understood that, while the oral history was being lost through the generations, much of the information was still there among the pages and pictures. How do you just discard a bundle of old letters exchanged between family units after a tragedy?
Little did I imagine what I would find once I began opening them — all of it consisting of stuff on paper, including photos and, intriguingly, several rolls of undeveloped film. And little did I suspect, once I had begun unraveling it all, what mysteries would remain.
Although I have siblings, it had all been passed down to me. Instead of dividing it up, which could only exacerbate any cohesive investigation of its secrets, and instead of failing for yet another generation to deal with it all, I accepted the challenge and dug in. For if I did not, it would all become useless disintegrating paper relics falling to my grandchildren, who would have no clue how to interpret or even read the script on documents and letters going back more than 200 years.
It is for them that I forged ahead, and for those cousins whom I know and whom I don’t know. And perhaps someone out there will read where I’ve been able to follow leads and hints only so far and have reached a dead end, and yet they will exclaim that they know the rest of the story and the side I have been able to tell is the other side of their own dead end. For this book partly unravels the stories of many near kin who are not my ancestors but who were part of their lives.
Around 2010 I began publishing a series of articles here at DamnYankee.com once I felt I had uncovered from these relics all I was going to about someone, my grandfather, Everett Hugh Woodbury, for instance, or about a family group portrait from my mother’s Dershem ancestors, or a peculiar piece of hundred-year-old mail that I bought from another stamp collector when I was a teenager with no idea that it pertained to my family history. Those previously-published articles and more are enfolded into this volume. For while there is much left to discover and investigate and integrate into the family history already told here, it was time to put this much into print and offer it to the wider world.
DamnYankee Publishing 