Life as Lorette
A Journey of Discovery, Study & Sharing
Monday, 14 March 2022 07:01
Putnam Settlement Cemetery
Putnam Settlement Cemetery is an "abandoned" cemetery located on the west side of Putnam Road in Bethany, just south of the Batavia town line in Genesee County, New York. The oldest burial was for Susannah, daughter of Timothy and Mehetabell Johnson, who died April 12, 1812, aged 16 years and 3 months. The last burial to take place in this cemetery was for Irving J. Putnam, son of Josiah and Lydia Putnam. He was listed…
Tuesday, 08 March 2022 06:54
Son's of John Shepard Sr
These six men are sons of John Shepard Sr (1777-1856) and Asenath Marvin (17??-1827) who settled in western New York in the early 1800’s on seven plots of land he purchased from the Holland Land Company. John Sr first lived on one of the plots on Putnam Settlement Road in Batavia, Genesee County, then in 1820 he moved his family of seventeen to a piece of land he purchased in neighboring Middlebury, Wyoming County. There,…
Tuesday, 05 May 2020 14:25
Before There Was A Western New York
Today it is called western New York but before 1800 everything west of the Genesee River (that runs north and south through Rochester) was primarily inhabited by Indians, wild animals, and fur traders, and known as the land of Six Nations. This is the area where Lorette’s family settled as early as 1802, but possibly the first white man to settle in this area was said to be Cornelius Winney, a fur trader from the…
Tuesday, 28 April 2020 13:21
Deciphering And Transcribing
When I first started reading the “Xerox” copies of Lucile Carr’s hand-written transcriptions, it was fairly easy to transcribe them into Microsoft Word, which I was familiar with and so the best choice for me to use in 2003. There were many unreadable entries and pages in the copies, however, and those were set aside in a to-be-dealt-with-later-stack. It took several years to transcribe and footnote all 55 years of Lucile’s transcriptions in this way.…
Tuesday, 21 April 2020 16:19
Researching Diary Content
About seventeen years have been spent so far, researching people and places mentioned in Lorette’s diaries - online genealogy sites, census data, books from this period, maps & atlases, cemeteries, and searching local historical archives - in an attempt to illustrate a backdrop to Lorette's life and the individual stories of each person and place mentioned in her diary. Since 2003 the internet has been an invaluable resource to do this, especially Ancestry.com. My research…
Tuesday, 14 April 2020 13:15
Discovery of Diaries
I first heard about the existence of an 1800’s Shepard diary from Paul Spiers, a cousin of Roy J Shepard, Jr. Paul was born in the Shepard homestead in 1918, and while visiting this area in 2003, he stopped by our house and introduced himself to me. He was a great storyteller, and that day he told me that there was a family diary written by a Shepard girl named Lorette Shepard, dating back to…