Saturday - 17 November, 2001

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Fall Update: Submitted by Barbara Bolster-Barrett

One of our "Founding Fathers," Harold (Hal) Miller, is home visiting his Berne family and friends until mid-November. On Monday, October 22, 2001, Hal presented a terrific program at the Berne Historical Society on the Early Settlers of Berne and how our collective efforts are adding tremendously to this base of knowledge.

Via the phone and Internet, Hal made contact with Elizabeth (Betty) Hayner, a woman with Shafer, Weidman, and Shultes roots. Thirty years of research and letter writing have allowed Betty to trace her ancestry back four generations. Hal had learned that Betty would be in Berne at the same time, celebrating her 50th Anniversary, so he asked if she would attend this meeting. Due, in part to our efforts to consolidate records, Hal was able to trace Betty’s ancestry back eleven generations! A couple of Betty’s ancestors were even on ship’s manifests from the German Palatine migration to upstate New York. Hal presented this information to Betty in a kind of "This is Your Heritage" format. She was thrilled to add so much to her family history. The program was well attended, (almost 60 people jammed into a smallish meeting room), and it was well received by all.

The Berne Historical Project is pleased to announce another exciting development. Genealogist, Dave Stott has in his possession some Military Pension papers for some Berne men who served in the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Terry Sholtes, on the Census team, also has some Revolutionary War Pension Testimony papers from ancestor, Jacob Scholtes* that he has already beautifully transcribed. Dave and Terry will be working on a Military web page to add to the site. They welcome any ideas, input or volunteers for this exciting new aspect of our project. Along these lines, Norma Luce June has kindly given us permission to transcribe No Sabbath on the Battlefield; The Diary of a Union Soldier From Berne, New York. (1863)** This diary was transcribed and researched by Ms. June, of Selkirk, NY, in 1996. She only asks that we copy the document in it’s entirety, including her annotations—a fair request. It's a remarkable document. We would be happy to send a copy to anyone willing to take on the task of typing the transcript. Please contact our webmasters if you are interested.*Terry Shoultes adds, "I would point out that my Tioga County family branch uses SHOULTES which may have been a combination of SHOLTES and SHULTES." (Spellings of surnames may vary--a fact you will want to consider if you are new to searching your Berne ancestors.)**Pvt. George H. Warner ended up in Port Hudson, LA with several recruits from Berne & the surrounding area. Most of them succumbed to "swamp fever."

The cemetery end of the Berne Historical Project has enjoyed tremendous good luck this fall. We’ve made valuable new contacts; new grounds have been identified, recorded and shot; we have a new digital camera at our disposal; and we have new transcriptions from two of the largest cemeteries in the township of Berne!

In mid-September, Pat and Gary Donhardt visited the Berne area. (Educator, Pat Donhardt and her daughters have formed Donhardt and Daughters Publishers. Their offerings include, Indian Ladder: A History of Life in the Helderbergs, by Gary L. Donhardt, Ph.D., and a compilation of Thompson’s Lake Church records, edited by Pat, entitled Second Dutch Reformed Church of Berne, Albany County, New York: Church Records from March 1826 to May 1891.) Berne Town Historian, Ralph Miller thought we might like to hook up, so he gave the Donhardts my phone number.Pat and Gary told me about a previously unrecorded ground approximately 1 mile NW of the Thompson’s Lake Reformed Church. As this was in a thicketed area, we brought gloves and clippers to clear shrubs, vines and brambles. We spotted several upright fieldstones that looked to be markers, then worked for about an hour to clear the spot. Our efforts yielded three shale markers, two of which carried hand-cut inscriptions—one rather well effected, the other, more rudimentary. Both stones marked Schermerhorn children. On the way back home, I passed the Berne town line just south of this new site. Apparently, the ground we had all worked so hard to clear was about 200 yards into the Town of Knox! We have decided to post this ground anyway, with a notation as to actual location. I wish to thank Pat and Gary Donhardt for a fruitful morning. They are a charming, intelligent couple. It was a pleasure to meet them. A couple days later, I met with another couple, Steve and Anne LaMont, of Huntersland, NY. The LaMonts serve as the historians for Huntersland, an area that encompasses parts of Berne and Rensselaerville in Albany County, and Broome and Middleburgh in Schoharie County. They have just recently completed transcribing the Union cemetery in Huntersland, a.k.a., the Huntersland Christian Church cemetery. This was a daunting task, as over 400 persons are buried there!The LaMonts were kind enough to give us a printout of the cemetery database, which literally saves us months of work! All I have to do is photograph the headstones. I have currently finished shooting 2/3rds of this ground, and anticipate having it all photographed by the end of November. Steve and Anne also showed me another "new" ground near the junction of Albany County Routes 10 and 12. This family burying site is on a knoll overlooking a shale pit. We found a downed marble stone for father, Peter Clyne and two unmarked children’s graves surrounded by a ring of stones—one larger circle and one a bit smaller. The LaMonts are highly knowledgeable about Huntersland, a unique area with an almost Appalachian flavor--replete with ridgelines, hills and hollows. They have my heartfelt thanks.

And yet more good news: Eagle Scout candidate, Ben Hoffman, and Berne Boy Scout Troop #79 have completed the arduous work of verifying and transcribing the Berne & Beverdam cemetery. We are looking forward to receiving a copy of their database. Ben’s dad, Pastor Bob Hoffman of the Berne Dutch Reformed Church, (and Scoutmaster), tells me that the Boy Scout Council has accepted Ben’s application. The BHP offers it’s warmest congratulations to Ben and a big thank-you for undertaking this project. As a final note, the cemetery end of the project has just gotten easier and ultimately less costly. I have at my disposal a beautiful Sony Mavica digital camera. While we have had to revamp some of our logistics, I have been able to successfully upload shots to our webmasters, Gordon & Joan Wright. This virtually eliminates most of our mailing costs. The Berne Historical Project continues to make steady progress toward our eventual goal of tracking each family descendant up to the point he/she leaves the Berne area. We applaud your support, volunteer efforts and clarifications.

Web Site Stats

We have moved Webstats to the bottom of the newsletter and will be showing the past 12 months.

Website Updates

When we started this project Joan and I where very new to website development. We began the work with a very easy to use and widely supported tool from Microsoft called Front Page. This program did a good job for use for about two months but as the site grew in size we started experiencing difficulties , for example, it was taking minutes to save a page after a change. Uploading the changes also took a very long time because of the process Front Page uses to determine if pages have changed. Don't get us wrong, this is a very easy to use program and works very well on a smaller site such as a personnel site but was not meeting our needs. Sooooo, we went looking.

Over the past couple of months we have been learning a new program and moving the site development over to a suite of programs from Macromedia. Dreamweaver is used for the site development, Fireworks deals with graphics, Flash will allow us to add media and the UltraDev upgrade will be used when we start developing the Active Server Pages. This is a professional level program used by web developers everywhere.

This was not an easy choice as well as not being cheap (over $1000.00) however this is the field Joan has chosen and when she completes her degree in the spring she will be able to use these programs in her future career.

Website Updates 2

We are close to publishing the family files that Hal and Ralph have been working on. Darin has been working on his program that generates the HTML files from a GEDCOM file. We have tested the Berne family file using various programs and found we would need anywhere from 20 to 110 meg/bytes of web space to add the pages. This file contains approx 30,000 names and will be a great asset to our site. To prepare for that time we determined we would need more room for the site so last month I upgraded our service with Earthlink from 75 meg to 175 meg. That should cover our needs for quite awhile.

EMAIL Addresses

Our hosting arrangement with earthlink allows us five email addresses that are set up to forward to another address. We have set up the following addresses.

historian@bernehistory.org - This will be forwarded to Ralph Miller.

volunteer@bernehistory.org - This will come to Joan and Gordon and be used to solicit additional volunteers from the web page.

newsletter@bernehistory.org - Used to subscribe or unsubscribe to the newsletter.

webmasters@bernehistory.org - To get related information to Joan and Gordon.

Census Update

As we reported in the last newsletter, Kevin and the census group have been busy. We have added a couple of new transcripts, updated the 1915 census and I have zipped all of the census spreadsheets to make them easier to download.

Unusual Coincidence

While entering cemetery records into the BHP database we found these two headstone records in the Warner Family Ground. Barbara had photographed both so the information is verified.

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Jacob H. Warner, died April 1 1827, aged 26 years 7 months 13 days. (on bottom) Sons of C & M Warner

Jacob H. Warner, died Nov. 14 1853, aged 26 years 7 months 14 days.

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It appears as if Jacob H. Warner, born Aug., 19, 1800 died April 1, 1827 at age 26 years, 7 months and 13 days. Jacob H. Warner, born on March 31, 1827 (the day before the senior Jacob H. Warner died) died on November 14, 1853 at the age of 26 years, 7 months and 14 days. One day older than his apparent namesake. This cemetery will be posted over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Cemetery Update

Barbara has come through with many very good pictures of various cemeteries. She has been able to use the libraries digital camera that has saved allot in film processing charges. Joan and I currently have over 300 pictures Barbara has sent us that we are working on to get them posted to the website.

During the summer Hal Miller, Barbara, Joan and I had a lengthy discussion about how to graphically locate individual graves within a cemetery. We all believe this would be invaluable to be able to view the physical location of one grave relative to others around it. Unfortunently we have not yet come up with an easy way to show this on our website. We are planning to plot the GPS position of each headstone and the coordinates will be available but at best GPS is only accurate to within about 30 feet and would not provide the information we are hoping.

One idea we have that would be a very long term solution is to have someone manually diagram the cemetery and show the location of each grave as a number on the diagram. This number could then be added to the database records we already have available on the website for each headstone. The diagram would be available as a graphic on the website. As you can imagine this would be a time consuming process but would give us a map of each cemetery showing the location of every grave.

If any of you have any other thoughts or ideas please contact us.

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