. Inventing Moses Beach .

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Documenting Moses Beach

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Encountering Moses Beach

I t’s entirely fitting that I would have first come across the name Moses Yale Beach in a copy of an old newspaper article. As I began to look into the life of this man, I would come to realize that it was also fitting that he’d only been mentioned as an aside — a point of interest within the main story. That is how Moses Beach and his legacy seem to have been treated over the last nearly two centuries ~ as more of a historical footnote than historic figure. And it’s a sturdy old Yankee name, “Moses Yale Beach”. Biblical, with notes of the Founders and New England farmland . The tones struck by the name are evocative of the times in which Beach lived his fascinating and nearly forgotten life ~ the early decades of the new United States of America. In our own tumultuous era, the name and those times may ring a more provocative bell; at least for some. In fact, even some of my own preconceptions would be contradicted ...

The Farmers ~ Part One

~Part One~ The Yankee Farmer Moses Yale Beach was born in Wallingford, Connecticut, in January of 1800. He was four generations removed from his ancestor John Beach, who had settled and built his homestead there in 1670, after his arrival from England. Moses was the second child of Moses Sperry Beach, Jr. and Lucretia Yale, who traced her lineage to Thomas Yale, another village founder and the brother of Elihu Yale, from whom the university takes its name. Lucretia Beach died just months after the birth of their son; within that same year, Beach’s father married Lois Ives, from another old farming family in the town. In the early 1850s, another Elihu Yale ~ at the time, the Postmaster of Cheshire, Conn. ~ gave an accounting of early Beach’s life in a Yale family genealogy. In addition to its enjoyably nineteenth century phraseology, this biographical sketch is notable in that it was written during Beach’s lifetime ~ perhaps, ...

The Farmers ~ Part Two

The Farmers ~ Part Two The Farmer From Killenard The Kelly family came to America from Killenard, in the Parish of Lea, which was a part of the Barony of Portnahinch, in the Queen’s County 1 . The barony sat in the northeastern part of the county, where the River Barrow defines portions of its borders with the King’s County and with County Kildare. To the east, on the Kildare side of the Barrow, lies the town of Monasterevin, in a barony of the same name; and south of it are the townlands that comprised the Barony of West Offaly. “Lea Castle, Queens County, Ireland” watercolor c. 1800 by Charles Fraser (1782-1860) Handwritten note identifies the Castle as Lea Castle in Ireland, and the tree a chestnut tree that is nine yards in circumference. Coill an Aird . In Irish, it means ‘Wood of the Height’; it is the local name for a group of townlands just south of the town of Portarlington. Ballycarroll , Ballybrittas , Tierhogar , and...