The journey may be said to have begun in earnest June 10, 1983, as my wife, my youngest daughter and I set out from Milwaukee for the east coast - ancestor hunting. Little did I dream at the time how unprepared I was for what lay ahead. I set out with little background information - grandparents names, family cemetery location, and a link to Wayne County, New York (the marriage of James Dunwell to Mary Ella Groat). I expected little, hoping only to perhaps find the names of great-grandparents.
The first stop was in Philadelphia and included visits to the family gravesite (Leverington Cemetery), the Archives Office at the City Hall and the Philadelphia Genealogical Society. At the cemetery we found that the Groat family gravesite was unmarked and I had to call on the caretaker to point them out for us. At the Archives Office I found only a single death certificate - for an uncle, Richard Lovejoy Groat, born September 9, 1881, and died October 17, 1906. At the Genealogical Society I also found little that I felt of great significance at the time. I did find a listing for my grandfather, an uncle and several aunts in the City Directories for the years 1901 through 1929.
At the Genealogical Society I also learned the first rule of any genealogist - never disregard a finding, no matter how remote it may seem, and always document where and when each bit of information is found. I discovered a file containing some clippings from the Boston Evening Transcript written by B. F. Groat during 1935, with references to a Peter Groat who settled in Groat's Corners" now known as Chatham Village. I passed these off as of no importance, an act that I later regretted. It was later discovered that B. F. Groat was Benjamin Feland Groat and that the Peter Groat of whom he wrote was Peter Groat (1753-1835) of Ghent, Columbia County, New York - my great-great-great-grandfather. While I should have learned a lesson from this oversight, I must admit I repeated it many times over by not documenting where I found miscellaneous bits of information. The result was repeated searches, sometimes unsuccessful.
The next stop was Wayne County, New York, where we first visited the County Court House in Lyons and reviewed the 1892 Federal Census record and found no listing of any Groat families. While I had set out with little great hopes of accomplishing a great deal, finding nothing by going through this first census proved somewhat disappointing. I look back on this now, after having spent thousands of unproductive hours pouring over census and other records, amazed at how naive I was. One of the employees at the courthouse suggested that we visit the office of Wayne County Historical Society and Museum, located in the old residence of the County Sheriff with the old County jail attached to its rear. Her advice, and our subsequent visit to the museum, had a profound effect on my life for the next three years! Until that time, I may have driven back to Milwaukee and forgotten the whole affair. But, once I entered that door, there was no turning back. I have since spent the better part of every spare hour in this research and in preparing this book.
In the entrance-way to the office of the Historical Society office is a plaque listing all of the County Sheriffs who occupied the building when it served as the residence of the sheriff and the county jailhouse. The seventh name on the list was "R. P. Groat" who later proved to be my great-grandfather, Richard Peter Groat (1822-1910). We spent the better part of two days there, working in the old sheriff's residence and the very office occupied by R. P. Groat and his family for three years (1874-1876). The Historical Society files include a wealth of information, including census records, birth records, death records, newspapers, etc. Working with my wife and daughter, I tried to copy and make notes of as much of it it as I could.
While in Wayne County we also located the family gravesite and the home of R.P. in Newark. I was able to obtain several death certificates and we took several photos of what we thought was the home of R. P., only to find out later that we had the wrong one. Finally, we discovered that both R.P. and his father, Jacob P. (1789-1868) had been born in Columbia County, New York. In one week, we had traced the family line back to 1789 - and I was hooked!
Back in Milwaukee, I found myself in a quanary; where do I go from here? It first appeared that attempting to research the family from afar would be tedious. The Milwaukee branch microfilm library of the Mormon Church provided access to the vast records or the Church at Salt Lake City. However, the Milwaukee Branch routinely holds microfilm records for only the upper midwest. One can order microfilm records for other parts of the country, and I did order several church records for Columbia County, but the turn around time is about 6 to 8 weeks. My records continued to grow, particularly of those family members born or married in and around Columbia County, New York, but as late as Christmas, 1983, I still knew of only a few family members still living - the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of my father and his brother. It was about that time that I discovered the Wisconsin State Historical Society.
The Wisconsin State Historical Society maintains a huge library on the campus of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Unlike most state historical societies that specialize in only the state with which they are associated, this one maintains an extensive library of local history, including birth, death, marriage, and census records for every state in the union. In addition they have an extensive collection of family histories such as this one. Among the first finds there was a family history that traced the ancestry of my great-grandmother, Mary Ann Lovejoy (wife of R. P. Groat) back to Buckinghamshire, England, in 1460, and another that traced the ancestry of my great-great-grandmother, Jane Shufelt (wife of Jacob P. Groat) back to 1710, in Columbia County, New York. It was there that I was able to locate a record of the original immigrant of our family which placed him in Columbia County, New York, also about 1710. Though about 90 miles from Milwaukee, I averaged about one evening a week searching through this fine library and I have missed this wonderful resource since I moved to Memphis in 1985.
During May of 1984, another real break occurred. I unexpectedly received a questionnaire regarding my Groat family background from Avalee (Groat) Smith of Bonita, California. The arrival of this inquiry was most opportune. I was beginning to believe that I would never find another living, related Groat. A telephone call disclosed that Avalee had obtained a mailing list, though a few years old, that listed nearly 600 Groats. Avalee is descended from another line of Groats, assumed to be of Scotch descent. However, she agreed to share the list with me and we agreed to split the workload of mailing the questionnaires. I took that portion of the list living east of the Missippi River and she took that portion to the west. We then provided each other with copies of the responses.
That summer (June 30-July 12, 1984), my wife, my youngest daughter, and I took another physical journey, this time to Columbia County, New York, but with a stop in Wayne County enroute. While in Wayne County, we managed to tour the home originally built by R. P. Groat around, 1850, and I found a copy of his will in the Wayne County archives. In Columbia County we visited Ye Olde 1811 Inn in the village of Chatham, earlier known as Groat's Inn under the proprietorship of Peter Groat, Jr., in 1811. The present village of Chatham was first known as Groat's Corners and later as Chatham Four Corners. We also found a great deal of valuable information in the files of the Columbia County Historical Society and the New York State Library in Albany. We visited and photographed a number of gravesites near the Groat family homestead in Ghent, the earliest being that of Hendrick Groat (1748-1832) and his wife Catharine Voland (1755-1823).
Following the trip, I mailed out the first two batches of questionnaires during September (total 150) and by the end of October approximately 50 had responded, either by mail or telephone. The fact that I had established contact with three related Groat lines in less than two months was encouraging. Within the next two months two more lines had been connected - The number of known living family members has been growing ever since. I had begun a family newsletter, The Long Groat Line in March of 1984. The mailing list for the newsletter now exceeds 60.
A break in the research came as I moved to Memphis during April of 1985. Without a computer and living temporily with my daughter and son-in-law, I was unable to give the project much attention for over a four month period. The family joined me in June and we had pretty well settled in by the end of July. The computer was set up and work resumed.
Until this time, I had documented the family back to 1711. The original immigrant of our family line was then said to be Johannes Groat, a "Hollander" among the Palatine German immigrants along the Hudson River in 1710 (per the work of B. F Groat in 1935). I had always felt that any attempt to trace the old country origins of the family would be futile. Then, during November of 1985, I was in New York City on business and took advantage of the opportunity to visit the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. There I found a copy of a book by Henry Z. Jones. Jr. entitled: The Palatine Families of New York: A Study of the German Immigrants Who Arrived in Colonial New York in 1710. In it he identifies the family of Johannes Grad as an old one in the Neuwied - Westerwald area of the Rhineland. He also lists the birth record of Johannes' daughter Eva, July 9, 1704. So Johnanes was not a "Hollander but a Protestant religious refugee from the German Palatine region of the Rhine River valley.
And so, this journey that began in the sleepy village of Sussex, Wisconsin, ended in the midst of a religious upheaval in far away Germany in the year 1704. Perhaps it could have been taken further? Others have been faced with a similar question. C. E. Lovejoy, in The Lovejoy Genealogy (1930). comments:
_____________________________ ...but, after all, isn't that going back far enough? The extreme limit was noted late in 1929 when a number of magazine supplements carried a full-page story of an Ohio woman genealogist under the following caption, "She Traces Her Ancestry All the Way Back to Adam and Eve." Ending with herself and beginning with Adam, then continuing through Seth, Henos, etc., she claims lineage of great dimensions. However, back of the sixteenth century she leaves much to the imagination. One gap is covered by the explanation, "ancient princes of Wales, the word "princes" being plural. Several jumps further back she breaches another gap with "ancient kings of Wales." On back she goes, almost breathless. One reads about Geoffrey of Plantagenet. Even William the Conqueror is her ancestor. But another and another gap are encountered, one breached by "seven generations of kings of Scotland," another by "twelve generations of kings of Argylshire." Still another gap is filled mysteriously but glibly when she enters in her family tree "fifteen generations of Irish kings." Then follow thirty-seven generations of Irish kings," then "six generations of Irish kings," and, finally, between Helos and David, she tucks in "thirty generations, male line, according to Luke, III."
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Like Lovejoy, this compiler has not found an easy path back to Adam and Eve. I feel fortunate to have found my way back nearly three centuries. And there we will rest, until perhaps some other family member will pick it up and add more or move further back in time. To him or her - I wish you good fortune. I hope that you find this book of some value in your efforts.
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Mail me at: jgroat1@midsouth.rr.com