Family History

My daughter noodles around on the computer and finds fascinating things, like a link (or whatever it is) that will shrink photos you want to send to people – so you are not sending a photo that is 6 feet tall and 17 feet wide and will take about a day and a half to download.
She also found a site that you can make up web pages on, geared to a family scrapbook sort of thing and so she went ahead and started one. We have some wonderful scrapbooks and notes from my mother, some outlining our family history and some on events that happened while my sister and I were growing up, and on through the granddaughters’ early years.
I was just looking at that (as an email from a few months ago that she sent me when she started the page, and I am just now getting around to sorting and filing that time frame of my emails). Anyway, she put a couple of pages of our family heritage on the site, and I am going to bore you with some of that today.
The Peduzzi side of it is actually fairly calm, and for all that we say we are Italian, my grandfather was actually born in Gabbio, Switzerland. His family came to America when he was a young boy, they settled in Westchester County. That’ll be another story.
The Hough side, my mother’s family, however, has several ‘claims to fame’. The first of those is that our ancestors Francis Cooke and his son John, were passengers on the Mayflower. Other ancestors Sarah Warren and Allen Breed came to this country in 1623 and 1630.
According to history books, The Revolutionary War Battle of Bunker Hill was actually fought on Breed’s Hill; no idea why the stories changed the location/name.
My grandmother on my mother’s side was named Avis, after another ancestor Avis Swift Keene (Keene was my mother’s middle name), who was the subject of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier “To Avis Keene”.
Another ancestor, Sarah Bassett, was sentenced as a witch (which may explain some of my personality although I spell it with a ‘b’) in 1692, but was freed 7 months later, happily.
Thanks to a once estranged family member who resurfaced and supplied much family history, my mother was able to trace the descendants of John Cooke to what might be our biggest ‘claim to fame’. John Cooke had three daughters. My mother’s family tree goes back to one of them. Tracing another daughter’s lineage to the same generation, we reach Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the third Cooke daughter’s progeny produced Winston Churchill. And, as my mother wrote, to make a nice tidy package of the whole thing and bring it all back to Kinderhook, Jenny Jerome, Churchill’s mother, lived at Lindenwald (the Martin Van Buren home, now a National Park) when she was a young woman.
Wonder what the Roosevelt’s and the Churchill’s would think to know they’ve got a pretty much broke relative living in a beat-up trailer home? Ah, like they say, you can’t pick your family.
The Hough/Stein (Breed/Bassett/Cooke, etc.) side of our family is having a reunion next month. The Peduzzi’s used to have reunions every year but Lynne was asking the other day and it occurred to me that the last one I recall was the year before my mother died, over 10 years ago. Gee, we should get our butts together, huh? We are down to my generation being the ‘older generation’ on both sides of the family now. I hope I can make it to the one next month, we don’t know that side of the family nearly well enough.