In September 1953, my aunt, Gladys Whalen Stoddard (1893-1973), wrote about her paternal grandfather, Thomas Whalen. Gladys was my father’s sister and the eldest child of Thomas’s only son, Charles C. Whalen and his wife Leta Mary Clarke Whalen. A photocopy of Gladys’s four-page document is included at the end…
Category: Maxon/Maxson
Leta Clarke Whalen’s 150th Birthday
Today, January 19, 2024, marks the 150th birthday of my paternal grandmother, Leta Mary Clarke Whalen. Grandma Whalen was born on January 19, 1874, in the town of Hounsfield, New York, to George Roswell and Mary Elizabeth “Libbie” Maxson Clarke. Her father’s farm was located on a no-longer existing road…
Some Ancestors’ Portraits
Many in our family have copies of the following four portraits. This is thanks to our dear brother, Charles Howard Whalen. Charlie made copies of these and other photos and made sure our dad and siblings each had a framed set. Charlie was devoted to family history, and we are…
Clean Up Days
Genealogy can be a messy subject! I’ve spent the past 2 days sorting through boxes and notebooks containing family group sheets, handwritten notes, interview write-ups, newspaper clippings, photos, how-to articles, maps, and all the other stacks of ephemera connected with doing genealogy the way we did it before computers came…