INTRODUCTION
This brief history of our particular line of the GROAT family is more than a simple compilation of facts regarding various family members, past and present. It is the story of a journey.
In 1979, after nearly a quarter of a century of traveling the world as a member of the U. S. Army, having crossed the Atlantic Ocean four times and the Pacific sixteen times; having vacationed in the Austrian Alps, toured the memorial remains of the Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of the quiet Bavarian town of Dachau, weekended in the symbolic rebuilt city of Berlin, in the middle of the Eastern sector of a divided Germany; having spent over two score years outside the United States, most of them in the Far East and Southeast Asia, in the dynamic city of post World War II Tokyo, exotic Bankok, war torn Seoul and Saigon, and innumerable filthy, impoverished villages of Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand; having driven nearly as far as possible on the American continent, from Panama to New Jersey, over roads that often more closely resembled rutted oxcart trails than highways, I came with my family to settle in the quaint village of Sussex.
Sussex is a small village in Wisconsin, about twenty miles west-northwest of downtown Milwaukee, with a population of less than 4,000. We went there, my wife and daughters and I, because Milwaukee was where I found employment after my retirement and we settled in Sussex because it offers both the closest thing to the peace and quiet of country life and all of the advantages and conveniences of a major metropolitan city. We agreed to forsake for all time, the hassles of travel. Later, in the midst of researching the family history, we again moved, this time to another small town - Bartlett, Tennessee. We did so to reunite our small family and to escape the snows of Wisconsin - but that is another story, for another time.
Little did we dream at the time that within three years we would embark on another journey. This would, however, be a different sort of journey. It would be a travel not through space but through time, measured not in miles but in years. The people we would meet would be at once strangers and the closest of friends - our ancestors and relatives. We would come to know a great many of these new friends closer than any we had met on our physical travels and yet we would never know for certain if we knew them at all. We would walk on the very same ground that they had tread and visit the churches where they had worshipped, and the graves where they had buried their dead over two centuries ago. We would tour the homes and businesses that they had built and where they had worked and lived in the early nineteenth century. We would read their writings and what was written of them long before we lived. Lastly, we would find that the more we knew of them the more there was to know, that our research would never be complete.
As I traveled this journey I found that others had preceded me, different travelers, taking different trails, sometimes crossing, and often leaving clues for those who followed. Sadly, none had documented their journey and published their findings. And so it was that I determined that, at some point in time, I would make an attempt to publish the facts as I found them. Incomplete though it is and probably fraught with errors, it may someday serve as a guide to some future family member, ten years or perhaps a hundred years down the road, who wants to find out from whence he came and how he came to be the person that he is, a product of all those who have gone before.
I am not the author of this volume - merely the compiler. It is, after all, a simple compilation of facts regarding the family GROAT. I have made every effort throughout this writing to keep it totally factual. Where there is some uncertainty regarding dates, parentage, marriage, etc., I have attempted to note it with qualifiers such as: "probably," "about," and "may have." Involved in an undertaking of this nature, however, the facts pile up at an amazing rate and one can easily become confused as to what is fact and what is assumed. There are bound to be some errors, hopefully few, in this work.
Attempts to pinpoint the beginning of the journey have proven fruitless. I have always been curious of my roots. As a child, unhappy with the middle name "Dunwell , I was erroneously told that I had been named after a United States Supreme Court Justice. On innumerous occasions I searched through history books, biographies, and various "Who's Who" publications in vain. It eventually turned out that he was a Supreme Court Justice of the State of New York, not a blood relative but one who married my grandfather's sister. Actually, being a "Jr.", it was my father who was named after this, then unknown, individual and I, in turn, named after my father. Apparently not a close family, I recall little discussion of my paternal family. I vaguely recall some discussion of my grandfather who died when I was an infant. He was supposedly disowned and disinherited when he married the family maid, Caroline Yager, and moved to Philadelphia, where they operated a bakery and where my father and I were born.
The curiosity remained but was never that strong, nor did I have any idea where one starts to trace a family line. The television miniseries "Roots" sent me, and millions of other Americans like me, off to the libraries and, like most others, I found little at the time. On July 10, 1977, I did locate a volume, Who Was Who in New York Law, which listed a James Winslow Dunwell, a jurist born in Newark, NY, December 19,1849. He was the son of Almerin Dunwell and Elizabeth Hill Storms, educated at Lyons Union School and Cornell University, where he studied law. He married Mary Ella Groat, May 22, 1878. Admitted to the bar in 1873, he was many years counsel for NY Central and Hudson River Railroad Company and Leased Lines. He became Justice of the Supreme Court of New York, elected for a term extending from January 1 1896 to December 31, 1910. He was Chairman of the Republican County Commission of Wayne County in 1880. He died in 1907. The significance of this find can not be overstated. By linking the name James Dunwell with Mary Ella Groat and with Newark and Wayne County, NY, it provided me with a base from which to search.
Then two events occurred which may be said to have been the major contributing factors leading to this publication. First, a spinster aunt, my father's sister Ruth Groat, passed away February 9, 1981. Since I'd entered the Army in 1953, I seen this aunt just twice, once when I returned from my first tour of duty in Korea and Japan in 1957, and later when I returned from Germany for my father's funeral in 1968. I went home from Milwaukee to New Jersey to assist in funeral arrangements and attend the funeral. Much to everyone's amazement, Aunt Ruth had been a very thrifty lady during her lonely life and had accumulated a considerable, though not great, savings which she left in trust to her deceased brothers and their heirs. The funeral arrangements had all been made by the trust administrators by the time I arrived. She was to be buried in the family plot in Philadelphia, with her parents, my grandparents, and her brother and three sisters. My cousins, my sister and I were rather astonished since we did not know that there were other sisters and a brother. At last a clue upon which to base some research, even if it was in Philadelphia and I was in Milwaukee.
The second event leading to this journey was the death of my mother, December 8, 1981. While we were making the funeral arrangements, my sister and I realized just how little we knew of our ancestors, our heritage, where we came from, and all of the other factors that, together, make us what we are today. Over the next several months, I determined to find out who I was.
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Mail me at: jgroat1@midsouth.rr.com