Tuesday, December 23, 2008

The Pratt Family - A Refresher Course II

The youngest of Phineas Pratt's eight children was Aaron (b. about 1654), who's oldest of eleven children was Henry (b. 1685), who had 13 children including Moses (b. 1729), whose second of ten children was the first Asa (b. 1757) who named his son by Sarah Bond Asa Jr., (b. about 1798), who in 1824 became the father of William Bond Pratt. 
 
During that span of nearly two centuries, the Pratt families migrated from Plymouth to several Massachusetts towns to New Hampshire and finally to Vermont where William Bond was born. Asa Pratt Sr. was a soldier in the Revolutionary War. He fought in the Battle of Bennington and was at West Point when the spy Major Andre was hung.
 
The women who bore the children and shared the living, loving, family raising, praying and dying along the way and over the years with these ancestral Pratt men were from families named Judkin, Pratt (no known relation), Alden, Parker, Woolson, Briscoe, Hyde, Greenwood, Woodward, Bancroft, Metcalf, Hammond, Cason, Bartlett and many other families whose names I have not yet discovered.
 
In 1881 Wilmer married Nellie Mynett Bartram* (b. 1858 East Aurora, New York) by whom he had five children: Charles, Burr, Joseph, Helen and Genevieve. When Genevieve was but two years old her mother died. Two years later Wilmer married Nellie's younger sister, Abigail Jennings Bartram (b. 1861- East Aurora), who bore two more of his children, Henry and Isadora. 
 
* Marj Pratt Ingram has their wedding certificate framed under glass. It is an elegant document with photos of the bride and groom.
 
PERSONAL NOTE: I did my genealogical research many years ago before home computers and the internet. I spent uncounted hours in the Genealogy Section of the Library of Michigan pouring though books and microfilm. I filled a couple dozen notebooks with hand printed notes and charts and copied many score pages of information and narratives, all in pencil.. I perused all available family records, letters, diaries and bibles and talked at length with the surviving old-timers.  I am actually quite comfortable with the product, unorganized though it may be. Son Jim and niece Pat know where it all is in case someone wants to pick up the baton.
 
What took me years could probably be duplicated in months or weeks now and more accurately with genealogy programs and world-wide internet access to records and libraries. Having lost track of Dan Elliot I don't know how much he may have augmented, improved or corrected my work. I understand that Marj Ingram is working with the Family Tree Maker program. Let me assure you that I will not be wounded if anyone discovers errors of name, date,  fact or assumption. If you do, please share them.
 
TOOL NOTE: Linda informs me that she has William's spoke shave and two tounge and groove planes. Anyone else?

Emailed September 2

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