Society Saturday - The Greater Pittston Historical Society

It has been over a year since I have posted to this blog, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about my genealogy or even doing the odd bit of research when I could.

After two years out of work I found a part-time job in December 2011.  Ten months later I was promoted and while it was absolutely a blessing, my new position leaves me with little time or energy for research, blog-hopping or post writing.

Last week I was finally able to take vacation and spend two days on a family history trip to Basking Ridge, NJ and Pittston and West Pittston, PA.  It was a fun and educational trip and I had much more success than I had any right to expect considering my lack of preparation.  The success of my trip was due in large part to Ron Faraday, President of the Greater Pittston Historical Society.

Without Ron, I never would have been able to locate the Matthews plot at Pittston Cemetery and the graves of my great-grandparents, Arthur William and Ada Hobbs Matthews.

I had read in a few places online that Pittston Cemetery had fallen into horrible disrepair and it also seemed that no one was managing the property at all.  I really wanted to find the plot and since I wanted to visit Pittston anyway and the old family home was only a couple of blocks away, I was willing to search for it.  I pictured us with plenty of water and bug spray, wearing old sneakers, long sleeves and our socks pulled over our jeans to protect from bigger critters, searching for hours but ultimately emerging victorious with photos of the headstones of the five family members buried in the plot...I had no idea.

About a month before our trip I stumbled on the website and Facebook page of the Greater Pittston Historical Society and discovered that they were in the middle of two weekends of a massive cleanup of Pittston Cemetery.  Before and after photos tell you just what an incredible undertaking it was and what a wonderful job they all did.  I found an email address on the Facebook page and wrote to the society to thank them and all the volunteers for their hard work and ask about burial records.

My reply came from Ron Faraday, the president of the society, with a telephone number for himself and one for the caretaker. A couple of emails later and he had had the caretaker show him the plot and then he met me at the cemetery on a weekday afternoon to show me the graves.

Pittston Cemetery is huge, folks, absolutely huge.  I would never have found the family plot on my own.  If we had decided to start at the entrance and work our way forward, even between three of us, we never would have had time to get to the Matthews plot.

Ron also put us on to the Northeast Pennsylvania Genealogical Society which it just so happens is open  on Thursdays (the second day of our trip), where I was able to find some fun information on my great-grandfather.

So, this is my shout out to Ron Faraday and the Greater Pittston Historical Society.  If you are fortunate enough to be in need of their assistance in your search, I can tell you they will do anything they can to help you.

Hopefully this will be one of many posts about our trip and I will be back soon.

Amanuensis Monday - Sundays at the Matthews House

This week's post is the fifth installment of my paternal grandfather's personal story and family history.  Here he wrote about a typical Sunday in the Matthews house.   He gives us a wonderful peek into a world that no longer exists; Buster Brown collars, button shoes and taxis entered between the rear wheels.

Sundays were busy days at 13 Nafus Street.  After breakfast my father sat in a large rocking-chair in our kitchen, with one of my mother's aprons tied around his neck, and was shaved by whatever son was around (not me).  Week days he was shaved at the barber shop on his way uptown where he kept his own shaving mug, lettered in gold "Arthur Matthews".  My job was to shine his shoes, for which he paid me 25 cents.  Usually there would be a visitor, a hobo [sic], being fed breakfast by "the girl" as our cook-maid was known.  Usually the girl was a recent arrival from Wales or England who frequently vented her homesickness for her native land by indulging in weeping spells.  The visitor was there by virtue of my father's rule that no person be turned away from the Matthews house hungry.  John Tobin, the only [African-American] in Pittston, who made a living carting rubbish to the city dump, was a regular visitor.

After the shave and the shoe-shine came preparation for Church, wiggling into that Buster Brown collar and getting into button shoes, and helping my mother get her's buttoned.  Then to Church uptown where I sat with my Mother as my Father would be leading the choir.  After church there was Sunday School.  And there was no chance of avoiding these two services unless you were sick in bed.

A one o'clock dinner was followed by visiting, either family or Welsh friends at our house or trips via street car up or down the valley to homes of Welsh families.  Except for the trolley ride these trips were a bore to me as usually our hosts were older people with no youngsters and under the Sunday rule I was supposed to be seen but not heard.  Visits to Fred's and Lillian's homes in West Pittston were more enjoyable because they had children of my age and the trips were made by taxi--one of the earliest models which was entered via a door between the rear wheels!

Sunday night supper always meant cold meats and potatoe [sic] cakes followed by a three-layer cake and home-canned fruits.  Saturday night supper in the winter months always included oysters in some form: stewed, fried or scalloped, made from freshly shucked oysters which my father purchased at the local fish market and brought home in a pail.

Seldom was there a night without the sound of music.  Welsh friends brought their fiddles and always their voices, and Bess and Charles sang duets.  And on choir practice night my father was apt frequently to bring the entire choir home with him and expect my mother to feed them.

**********

I love his description of family time.  Growing up as an only child on Long Island with my cousins in New England and Canada, I am green with envy when I read Grandpa's descriptions of family time.


In next week's installment my Boppa (a childhood mispronunciation of mine that stuck) tells us about his household chores and how he earned money as a child.

Amanuensis Monday - Pt 2 of A Story by Howard Matthews

Last Monday I started transcribing the personal story and family history of my paternal grandfather, Howard B. Matthews.  I'm sorry to say that I disparaged him a bit in that post, saying that he did not cite his sources.  Well, he didn't, in the finished version of his manuscript.  But he did save all of the correspondence with his family while he was trying - over many years as it turns out - to piece together the facts of his family.  I found all those letters this week and although I know it will take a long time to go through it all, I can tell I have found a rich source of information.

The first installment gave us a little history of the Pittston, PA area and ended with my great-grandfather, Arthur Matthews' immigration to the United States shortly after Abraham Lincoln's assassination.  Today you will learn a little more about Arthur and about my great grandmother, Ada Hobbs Merritt Matthews and her family.

       I do not know what caused him [Arthur Matthews] to settle in Pittston, but from the number of Welsh people we visited on Sunday afternoons during my childhood, and the number who in turn visited us at 13 Nafus Street, it is possible that they influenced his choice.  And it is possible that his first wife was of the Griffith families who came to the USA from Wales in 1830 and 1860, settled in Pittston and neighboring Plymouth and were engaged in sinking coal mine shafts. Or he may have been related to and had maintained contact with descendents [sic] of William Matthews who emigrated from Wales to Litchfield, Connecticut in 1671, and decades later married into the Lyman Hakes family of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

In any event he went to work in the mines of the Pennsylvania Coal Company, founded by William R. Griffith.  I imagine, altho I am not certain, that at first he must have been just a miner.  But not for long, for his first love was music.  He played the violin and the piano, composed hymns and led the choir in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Pittston.  Soon, as an independent contractor, supervising his crew at the mines required only the first two hours of the day; the rest of the day he spend at his music store uptown.  A very devout Roman Catholic Miss Allen ran the store when he was busy elsewhere.  Later she became a nun.

By his first wife, a Griffith, he fathered two sons; William Matthews, 1869 and John Matthews born 1870.  We are told that she died in childbirth.  Thus, my father was widowed when he was 26.  At that time my mother, Ada Hobbs Merritt Matthews (born in 1855) would have been only 15 years of age.  We do not know the date they married* but their first child, my sister Lillian, was born in 1878 when my mother would have been 23 and my father 34.

My mother’s brother, Joseph Hobbs, and her two sisters, Emily and Bessie, came to this country from London and lived in West Pittston, Pa., with their mother’s brother, Uncle John Merritt.  Later, following the death of her mother, my mother, then a very young girl, came to live with Uncle John and his wife Margaret.  I know no more about my mother’s family or how they were situated, but several things seem to indicate that they were not an impoverished family.  A picture of my mother, taken in London when she was quite young, shows a very well dressed young lady.  And Uncle John Merritt is described as a native of England, of a family of inventors.  Also, many times, as a child I heard (and Dorothy did also) about tea lands owned by my mother’s family in the Far East and that unless someone of the family went to England to assert ownership, thy would revert to the Crown.  This was brought up again and again, always with regret that no one had looked into it.

A History of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, published in 1893, describes Uncle John and his wife, Margaret Stephens Merritt, as natives of England, of a family of inventors.  It states that John Merritt had charge of the machinery of the Pennsylvania Coal Company until 1870, and was superintendent of the Pittston Gas Co. until his death in 1882 when my mother was 27.

My mother lived with Great Uncle John and his wife Margaret until she married my father.  Margaret is said to have strongly opposed the marriage as they had become very fond of Ada and felt she was much too young to marry a widower who was the father of two young sons.  Apparently she was opposed to marriage in general, for their own daughters, Mary and Margaret, never married.  In addition, they had two sons, John W. Merritt, Jr. born 1859 and Adrian.  Adrian was an engineer.

My niece, Dorothy Hunter Krick Kenworthy, older daughter of my sister Lillian, knew John Jr. and his two sisters quite well and called on them and John’s daughter Edith at the homestead on Wyoming Avenue in West Pittston.  She describes them as very proper persons who spoke the King’s English and served tea every afternoon.  Uncle John who live to be 90, (he attended Wyoming Seminary), she describes as an interesting and well educated electrical engineer.  He was Superintendent of the Pittston Light Co., and was responsible for the planning and installation of electric power in Pittston.  Later he moved to Virginia as a mining engineer.  Dorothy and her mother Lillian visited Uncle John and the two sisters frequently.  Dorothy says she enjoyed Margaret because she was more down to earth and she had a wonderful sense of humor.  She was organist of the West Pittston Trinity Church for years.  The Merritts were Episcopalians as was Grandma Matthews (my mother) until she married.

Dorothy describes my mother’s sister Emily as a petite little person, very proud of her appearance, especially her dainty feet!  Bessie, for whom my sister was named, was extremely attractive and had a beautiful singing voice.  After her marriage to William Snell they lived in Dorrancetown (now Kingston) where she sang in the Methodist choir.  They legally adopted Mr. Snell’s niece, Ellen, a close friend of my sister Lillian.  Ellen later became Deaconess of the M. E. church.  Aunt Bessie died in the 1930s.

Dorothy’s letters, from which much of this information is taken, are filled with other backup materials.**

*   I found the date of Ada and Arthur's marriage - they were married at the Methodist parsonage on October 28, 1876.

** I have just found these letters.

Amanuensis Monday - A Story by Howard B. Matthews - Part I

An Amanuensis is a person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another. Amanuensis Monday is a daily blogging theme which encourages the family historian to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin – some we never met – others we see a time in their life before we knew them.

Howard Matthews was my paternal grandfather and although I don't remember hearing about it while he was alive, it seems he also had the genealogy bug.  In the last years of his life he was trying to put together a family history with as much information as he could find.  Although an accomplished accountant, he was a frustrating family historian because he didn't cite his sources.  Still, he left behind a some wonderful details that I hope will help me on my own genealogical journey.

Over the coming weeks I will be sharing my grandfather's typewritten history (put together in 1984) in order to preserve it for posterity, put it out there for other family members and hopefully give you some entertainment along the way.

The first installment will give you some family background, a little history of Pittston, PA and introduce you to my great-grandfather.

A Story

by Howard B Matthews

        I, Howard Bierly Matthews, was born in our family home, 13 Nafus Street, Pittston, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 1901, the 8th child of my father, Arthur William Matthews, the sixth of him and his second wife, Ada Hobbs Matthews.  I am the survivor of these eight children, 2 daughters and six sons.  My mother was 46 and my father 57 when I was born.

13 Nafus Street, Pittston, PA
Date Unknown

Pittston was one of the five townships founded by loyalists from Connecticut in 1768.  It is named after William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, a graduate of Cambridge and a member of Parliament.  It is situated in Luzerne County in northeastern Pennsylvania, on the main branch of the Susquehanna River, in historic Wyoming Valley, scene of the contest between Connecticut and Pennsylvania over land ownership which each claimed to have obtained from the Six Indian Nations in 1754 and 1762.  The dispute resulted in warfare between early settlers who espoused Pennsylvania’s claim and the Crown Loyalists who upheld Connecticut’s.  The Crown was unable to settle the argument, warfare continued and eventually resulted in victory for the Crown forces who had the assistance of Tory Rangers and Iriquois [sic] Indians.  There followed in 1778 the Wyoming Massacre, one of the bloodiest in American history.

Anthracite coal became the largest source of employment and wealth in that part of Pennsylvania.  Records indicate that the first shipment of coal was made in 1807 via the Susquehanna river and that coal was shipped directly from Pittston as early as 1813.  By 1850, a series of double-tracked planes had been constructed to haul coal from Pittston over the mountains to Hawley, Pennsylvania, where a canal provided a connection to the Delaware and the Hudson rivers.  Later, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad became the thoroughfare for the shipment of coal to the west.

In 1851 a plank road was built connecting Wilkes-Barre and Pittston and, via a bridge across the Susquehanna, to West Pittston.  The first National Bank of Pittston was established in 1864 (my nephew, Willard Hunter was later to become its President).  There followed the Miners Bank in 1869 and the Peoples Bank in 1871.  Pittston’s newspaper, the Gazette, was established in 1850.  There were three churches:  the Methodist, established in 1808, the Presbyterian in 1842 and the Episcopal in 1848.  By 1865 Pittston was a community of about five thousand homes.

The foregoing is by way of a setting for the arrival of my father.  He joined aforesaid Methodist Church on February 28, 1869.

My father was born in Coleford, Monmouthshire, England, the seventh child of Mark and Mary Matthews who also were born in Coleford.  He spoke Welsh, that unpronounceable language.  As a young man he had worked in and around the coal mines in Coleford.  He came to the USA as a member of a British orchestra which arrived in New York City the day Lincoln was buried*.  I think he must have been about 23 at that time.  He left the orchestra, settled in Pittston and never again saw his native land.


*Abraham Lincoln was buried in Springfield, IL on May 4, 1865.  I searched New York passenger lists for that date and did not find any Arthur Matthews arriving in NYC that day.  I did find an Arthur Matthews arriving in New York from Liverpool on April 25, 1865 - the second day that Lincoln's procession was in the city.