Town Historian Fletcher Davidson

With the arrival in Bovina this coming week of Ed and Dick Davidson, two sons of the late Fletcher Davidson, I thought I'd share some memories about one of my predecessors as Town Historian. Fletcher was a life long resident of the Town of Bovina, born there in 1895 and only leaving to attend college and to serve in France in World War I. A more detailed record of that time in his life can be found on the Delaware County Genealogy website at http://www.dcnyhistory.org/diaryfletcherdavidson.html, where his son Ed has placed a transcription of his father's WWI diary.

Fletcher was married to Lois Ormiston in 1921 and they settled in Bovina to raise their family. I more vividly remember Lois in my younger days, since she was the choir director and church organist when I was a child. Lois had a stroke in the 60s and Fletcher was amazingly clever in creating tools for her so she could continue to be active with the use of only one hand. I seem to recall an article in the newspaper about it.

My more memorable encounters with Fletcher happened in my young adulthood. In 1978, I stumbled on the fact that my dad's mother's mom and his father's grandmother both shared the last name of Miller. I had heard that Fletcher had quite a collection of genealogy files for certain Bovina families. I later learned these were the Bovina Families notes created by his uncle David Hoy in the early 20th century. When Fletcher was in Russell's store one day (where I was working), I asked him about the Millers and whether or not he might have any information that would show my grandparents may have been related. He said he might and we talked about my coming down sometime to see what he had.

The next day (April 26, to be exact - the advantage of having kept a diary) Fletcher came into the store with nine sheets or so of handwritten material in which he provided information on all the Millers. So I eagerly took these home, plugged the names into a genealogical chart and I was on my way as a genealogist. During the next few days, I eagerly explored the cemetery near my house and was thrilled to find the graves of so many of my ancestors. I still have those sheets and that first chart. I date my interest in my family tree and in local history from that encounter. And yes, my grandparents were third cousins once removed. It is through the Millers that I am related to the Davidson family.

My dad recalled what a sharp memory Fletcher had. Dad could point to almost any house in Bovina and ask Fletcher who owned it in the past. He would know and often could recite almost the entire history of ownership. He's been a hard act to follow as historian! I usually know where to find the information, but I always have to go to my sources for anything that detailed.

As Fletcher got older, he spent more time with his sons in California, making occasional visits to Bovina. He started a project to transcribe the entire set of the family history notes that he had inherited from David Hoy. It was this transcript that I in turn transcribed into the computer and is now also on the Delaware County Genealogy site at http://www.dcnyhistory.org/bfindex.html. I now have access to the David Hoy materials and have started the very slow process of verifying my transcription and Fletcher's with that information.

As the personal computer age dawned, Fletcher started entering some of the family history information into his computer, and was doing so until just days before his death in California in 1987. All three of his sons, though none were living in Bovina, continued his legacy. Alan, my dad and I had a number of conversations about Bovina history in 2003. Alan passed away only two weeks after my dad in 2004, but his brothers continue their work in verifying all the burials in the Town of Bovina. Because of their hard work, Bovina has the best documented dead people in the state - and that information is readily available on the Delaware County Genealogy website at http://www.dcnyhistory.org/bovinaindex.html (just scroll down a bit to cemeteries and see all the material they've submitted).

Continuing a tradition that started in 1998 and became an annual one in 2005, Ed and Dick come East every summer, stay in my house, and continue their work on the cemeteries - oh yes, and they do visit family and friends! So welcome once again Davidson boys, to the bucolic splendors of your home town.

Getting ready for Bovina Day

I spent a good chunk of this weekend doing Bovina Historian stuff, about evenly split between creating metadata for all the image files I have (which is going to take months to complete, but at least it's started) and preparing my talk on Town Picnics for Bovina Day on July 18. The latter is taking a lot of effort. There's so much I could talk about, but it is a picnic and I think after a long day of visiting all the yard sales, watching the Bovina Fire Department give its demos, visiting the book sale at the Bovina Public Library, watching the Bovina Dairymen play against Fleischmann's, watching the parade and having a picnic supper, everyone's going to be rather pooped! I think ending the day by putting everyone to sleep won't go down well in the annals of the history of Bovina. But there's some fun stuff to report. What could have Miss Foote, the County Nurse, have had to say at a town picnic in 1919? No, I don't have the answer, but we can all speculate. Hope to see you there.

My Resume

It has been suggested that I need to put my resume on my blog. Since it's four pages long, I thought I'd do a summary instead.

I spent my whole childhood in Bovina, graduating from Delaware Academy in Delhi in 1973. I got my B.S. degree in Social Science Education in 1977 from SUNY Oneonta. After spending six years living and working in the Washington, DC area, I returned to New York to get my Masters in Library Science from SUNY Albany in 1985.

The masters program trained me to be an archivist and records manager. I worked for the Albany County Hall of Records until mid-1986 and then moved to Dutchess County to serve four years as the Records Management Officer for the county. In 1990, I started working for my current employer, the New York State Archives. I spent a decade serving as the Regional Advisory Officer for Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland and Westchester Counties. I advised local governments on the management of their records. In 2000, I transferred to Albany to take my current position of Coordinator of Archival Advisory Services for the State Archives.

My interest in Bovina history dates back to my young adulthood, when I started delving into my family tree. Since much of my ancestry was rooted in Bovina, I began to learn more about the town's history. This was enhanced during my graduate studies, when I did an independent study project that involved sorting out the town's records vault.

The fact that my dad, Charlie LaFever (Bovina Town Supervisor from 1978-2002), was interested in local history further fed my interest. It was something we had in common. At the time of his passing in 2004, he was serving as the Bovina Town Historian. I approached the town board about succeeding him and was appointed in the spring of that year. Not only am I following in my dear old dad's footsteps, but those of two of my predecessors, Hugh Lee and the late Fletcher Davidson, who was very instrumental in starting me down the road in researching my family history. I have some impressive shoes to fill.

So there's my background in a nutshell. In another post, I'll summarize some of the activities I've done since becoming town historian. Stay tuned.