LeRoy Pennysaver & News

LE ROY PENNYSAVER & NEWS - MARCH 1, 2020 by Lynne Belluscio It’s an ongoing project – clearing off the tables in the library at the Historical Society. Somedays, the piles of papers are like an alluvial fan, falling one into another. One pile is requests for genealogy research. Another is for history research. Then there’s the pile of “ I don’t know where to put it.” And another pile of “Somebody else needs to deal with this.” I apologize to folks who come in to do research when I have to make a little place for them to work. I always have to remind myself, that inevitably when I clear the table off, stuff is going to arrive in a box and fill the table up again. We laugh about it, but it’s true. So, I cleared off one end of the table and sure enough, it’s filled again. But thank goodness!! Because the stuff that came in is extremely important. About a year ago, Wilfred Vasile, who has been our genealogist for over 40 years, said that it was time to move all of his 3 x 5 cards to the Historical Society. He wanted to downsize and he knew that if he ever needed to use them they would be available. This last week, Bruno Defazio went over to Wil’s apartment and he loaded box after box of cards into his truck and we hauled them up on the elevator to our library. There were nearly 40 boxes and we stacked them on the table. There are three sets of cards: births; deaths; and marriages. They are all cross referenced and arranged alphabetically. They include names from LeRoy and the surrounding area. There are thousands of cards. Wilfred has gleaned the information from several sources, including newspapers, and other genealogy files, and most valuable - - notes that he took when working with Father Zuppa at St. Joseph’s Church. Father Zuppa wouldn’t let anyone read through the marriage and birth records. If you were interested in a particular family, he would find the record and read it to you. Of course, many of them were in Italian. Wil has been adding to the boxes of cards for many years, but what is really remarkable is that Wil is legally blind, having lost the sight in one eye and having only limited vision in the other. He grew up at the School for the Blind in Batavia, and then came to work at Lapp Insulator. His interest in genealogy came about when he rented a room from Marian Russell, former secretary of the Historical Society – and teacher at LeRoy High School. While Wil was r e s e a r c h i n g Italian families, he assembled a phenomenal amount of information and assembled it into family charts in ten notebooks, which sit on our genealogy file cabinets. Most folks who are interested in Italian genealogy are amazed at the work that has been done. The card files and the notebooks are a life’s work that Wil has given to this community. And we hope folks will feel free to come in and use his files. Today, Bill Lane’s daughter stopped by. She brought a box with LeRoy photographs that her father had been working on when he died. Luckily there was a little room left on the table. Bill had diligently worked with the huge collection of photographs for many years. He also wrote a short biography on each of LeRoy’s early photographers. I told her that I had been thinking about her father last week when I received a call from a man who had discovered a collection of about 100 glass plate negatives, which he had traced to LeRoy. The amazing thing is that the glass plates were discovered in an old farm house in Duanesburg - on the other side of the state. I immediately identified two negatives, and was able to find prints in our collection that her dad had inventoried. The prints were of little Sophia Hooker at her house. She is sitting on the front porch with her dog and the other she is sitting inside the house playing with her dolls. She lived in the house which we know as Farmer’s Creekside. Her father was Percy Hooker, a state senator from LeRoy and the first New York State Highway Commissioner. I told Bill Lane’s daughter, that I would have never been able to make the connection of our prints and the glass plate negatives if her father hadn’t sorted and filed our photos. But even more amazing, was that we have ten glass plate negatives in our collection that we have determined are part of the collection that was found in Duanesburg. It will be a while before we know more about the collection, and the challenge is to identify the photographer. Oh, how I wish I could talk with Bill Lane. I’m sure he would be able to help. In the meantime, I have ordered some special archival boxes to house the glass plate negatives. And soon the table will be clear again - - just waiting for some other treasures. Making Room on the Table