My Journey:

Wow... here it is August 13 already, and I haven't written about July.  I am slipping even more than usual.  I suppose that I could lie and say that I wrote this on.. say.. August 8.  Yea, that would be better.

Well, since returning from New York and my genealogical findings there, I have been working to upload that information to the website.  Therefore you see a lot of entries have been added in the last month or so.  I've actually slowed down a bit so that I don't end up with two pages of "Hot News" and some of the new stuff is missed.

One interesting side trip that I made was up to Arenac County, Michigan to verify the information on Josiah Wesley Decker, who I can now be certain was the same person who lived in Ellisburg, Jefferson County, New York, and is the brother of my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Decker.  Josiah remarried Mary Nutting about 1885 and lived in Arenac County until his death in 1923.  Mary died in 1912 and is buried in Sterling, Michigan.  I suspect that Josiah is there as well, and probably never got a headstone, as he was about the last of his family in the area.

I wonder a lot about the reference in my great-grandfather's obituary that he was born "near Syracuse" when in fact he was born a lot closer to Buffalo (Newfane, Niagara County).  I wonder if he new of the relatives in Ellisburg (aunts & uncles) as well as the uncle in Josiah, who moved from there to Sterling, Michigan.  These relatives all died by the 1920s, but would explain the connection of James Franklin Decker to Ellisburg, Jefferson County, New York, or his relatives "near Syracuse" as they lived about an hour north of there.

One final stop I need to make (hopefully) would be to my own local county clerk's office (Bay County, Michigan) to see if there is a marriage record there of Josiah Decker and Mary Nutting about 1885 (this is about the time that Arenac County was split off from Bay County), as well as his son Arthur Wesley Decker who reportedly married in Bay County about 1890.

Seems as though the name Wesley was carried through not only members of this family, but my grandfather and father both had the middle name Wesley, which became my son Ryan's middle name.

last modified August 13, 2008

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