The Boating Genealogists made a summer genealogical trip to Huron, Wolcott, and Cato New York in August 2023. After the American Revolution Wolcott New York, then known as Sterling, was part of the Military Bounty Tract. That tract contained lands awarded to veterans of the victorious American forces, lands that were previously held by Britain’s Indian allies. Several of my ancestral families settled there for some decades before moving on into the Midwest U.S.
Driving to Sodus Bay, New York, we stayed at the Bayfront Bed and Breakfast at Sodus Bay, an 1830’s house, for three nights. Our hostess was very gracious and the breakfasts were large, a great way to start the day with plenty of fuel. The house once served as a hideout on the underground railroad, and had a small hidden alcove where people could hide until searchers had passed by.
I have several ancestral families that settled near Sodus Bay in Wolcott, in what is today Wayne County, New York, in the post-Revolutionary era. My 4th great-grandfather Solomon Wright and his sons Solomon Jr. and Thompson J. Wright settled on lot 60 in Wolcott by 1813, and Solomon’s son Frederick settled on lot 61. Determining the location of what once was the Wright’s land in Wolcott involved much researching. Little by little we gathered facts and clues that led us to the area where the family settled.
The book Wolcott Old and New by John O. Wadsworth contains a list of the early lots of Wolcott. The Wayne County Historian’s office and the two historic societies that we visited on this trip each had at least one copy of this book on their bookshelves. On page 23 on the list of military-tract lots in the book, Peter Boice, Solomon Wright’s brother-in-law, is listed as owning lot 60. [1]
I wrote a detailed account about descent from Solomon Wright and about the Wright family as they made their way over the centuries from Kelvedon Hatch in England to Connecticut, then Massachusetts, then New York and finally into central Michigan where they settled over 180 years ago. Both Solomon Wright and Peter Boice were Revolutionary War veterans and Solomon’s story appears in my book Discover Your Roots! How I Found my North American and Revolutionary War Ancestors.
Solomon Wright and his brother-in-law Peter Boice had a different land transaction in 1796. That transaction was for a lot in Manlius New York as seen below in a copy of a page appearing on the website FultonHistory.com. Interestingly, a land transaction for another Revolutionary War soldier that I descend from, Conrad Bush, appears immediately below the Bois/Wright transaction.
The land transaction for Wolcott’s lot 60 set up the Wright family’s settlement there until the year 1839 when several brothers in the Wright family relocated to Michigan. Their move was likely prompted by cheap land in Michigan, coupled with a severe national monetary depression that occurred in 1837 and persisted until 1843. [2]
The Wayne County seat is in Lyons, New York. Our first stop on our genealogical visit was to the Wayne County Historical Society, also in Lyons. Wayne County was formed in 1823 from Seneca County and Ontario County. Records of the early towns could be kept in any of those counties. An interesting map showing the development of New York’s counties is online and it details the name changes of the county jurisdictions.[3]
The Historical Society was helpful to our search for information on several families. They had ancient maps and some helpful records. Thankful for their assistance we made a donation and I promised to send them a copy of my book. Our next stop was the Wayne County Historian’s office, an office in the County Clerk of Courts offices.
New York State mandates that each county have a Historian as part of their County Clerk’s office. The Wayne County Historian’s office keeps files on some of the families that settled in the area that include correspondences with people that have sought information on the various families over the years. We looked through the files for the Wright, Hendricks, and Church families and found a bit of new information in the Wright file. We also searched for a Shattuck, or Chattuck, file but there was none.
In the Wright file were correspondences with various people, including myself, who were researching the family over the years. One person detailed much more family information than I had when I started my search several years ago. I looked up that person on Ancestry.com and found that their family descended from a son of Solomon Wright the Revolutionary War soldier, also named Solomon, who settled in Grand Rapids Michigan as its first settler. His family had passed down more information about the Wright family than my family had and I could only ponder what makes some families pass down their ancestry through the generations and others to not do so.
The next day we visited the Wolcott Historic Society in Wolcott and we were surprised at the extent and variety of the documentation that is held there. We were able to locate even more map books from the 1800’s as well as original town and business account books detailing day to day aspects of life there in the very early 1800’s, including the medicinal recipe below.
Some of the most ancient records at the Wolcott Historic Society were saved because they were purchased for the Society at an auction. Many of those records are written in the hand of Adonijah Church, one of the earliest residents of the town, a man who held many positions of authority over the years in the growing government of the place. Interestingly, Adonijah’s name appears in Solomon Wright’s Revolutionary War pension file as a judge who both vouched for Solomon and who chastised the War Department for losing Solomon’s pension application.
We located maps at the Wolcott Historic Society from the 1800’s that had the military tract lot numbers of the old Wolcott area. Wolcott was originally called Sterling New York and its area was much larger than the Wolcott of today. The Church family were early 1800’s settlers of Wolcott and there was a lot of information on them. I found nothing tying my Church family ancestors to the Church family of early Wolcott.
One of the areas that grew from Wolcott is called Red Creek and today it is a small hamlet bordering Cayuga County. The Wright’s land at lots 60 and 61 was located next to today’s Red Creek and the lot numbers appeared on several of the ancient maps.[4]
We next went to the Seneca County Clerk’s office. The Seneca County Historian’s office was not open but we were ables to search through the early deeds for family names in the County Clerk’s office.
With a better understanding of the location of the Wolcott land where the Wrights lived over 200 years ago we were able to locate the position of lots 60 and 61 on current day maps. Next, we visited the general location of the land. The lots encompass a large area of lovely rolling farmland, most of it under cultivation. Today lots 60 and 61 are still expansive and bountiful agricultural lands, (see Google Earth photo below).
After stopping for photographs, we traveled a short distance to the vicinity of Cato, in Cayuga County New York. We located the property where my 3rd great-grandfather Lewis Travis homesteaded from the early 1830’s to about 1860 when the Travis family moved to Michigan, around the start of the Civil War. The land there is close to Cross Lake and is vacant and mostly fallow today. Our previous blog about the Travis family in the Civil War included an early plat map showing the location of this land.
Lewis Travis’ son Theodore wrote a family history that includes an intricate drawing of their Cato house, their lot, and the neighboring vicinity. Theodore misremembered the name of his grandfather in his family history, a man who died about the time that Theodore was born. Hoping to locate the grave of that 4th great-grandfather, named Ananias Travis, we visited the small Crossman Cemetery about three miles away. I thought the cemetery would be a likely burial location for Ananias because of its nearby location and because it is the resting place of his great-grandson Willie Travis.
A diligent search showed no grave marker for Ananias but I was able to locate the grave of my 4th great-grandfather Enos Cowell who had lived in nearby Weedsport New York. Enos was a man who was active in politics in Cayuga County. He is buried next to his 3rd wife Catherine. Her marker has fallen down and his is leaning, as are many in that small cemetery. I also located the marker for Willie Travis who was Lewis’ infant grandson who died in 1862. Willie Travis was the son of John Loomis Travis who was one of many soldiers killed on Culp’s Hill protecting the Union’s flank at the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Willie is buried next to the kin of John Loomis Travis’ wife Susan Ann Spinning, a woman who knew more than her share of tragedy.
Continuing our genealogy search we visited the Cayuga County Historian’s office in Auburn, New York. The historian was very helpful and found files for Bush and Blanchard families but no Cowell file. The historian introduced us to The Balloting Book & Other Documents Relating to Military Bounty Lands in the State of New York. [5]
That book has a partial map of the Military Bounty lots (the map does not include Sterling/Wolcott) and a listing of the lots as awarded, (which does include the Sterling/Wolcott lots). The map appears below and shows the vast area of the land in the Military Tract.
The Bush family file was almost entirely about the two Bush Presidents’ ancestry, no relation to my Weedsport Bush family. The Blanchard file had newspaper clippings from the mid-1900’s and nothing about my Revolutionary War ancestor Reuben Blanchard’s family that settled in Ira, Sennett, and Victory in Cayuga County. As we noted throughout our visit, the early records of New York during the period when the Military Tract was being settled are at best scattered among the different counties and difficult to locate, if they exist at all. Some of Reuben Blanchard’s family later settled on the Toledo Strip in Whiteford, Michigan. Today the town is called Sylvania, Ohio.
Running out of time to explore the area we reluctantly made our way back to Erie Pennsylvania and to our boat for the evening, ending this August’s excursion into the past.
[1] John Ogden Wadsworth, Wolcott Old and New, p. 23, Minnie B. Wadsworth, 1975.
[2] Richard B. Morris, Encyclopedia of American History, p. 178, Harper Bros., New York, 1953.
[3] Interactive Map of New York County Formation History. https://www.mapofus.org/newyork/
[4] New Century Atlas Wayne County New York, p. 55, Century Map Co., Philadelphia, 1904.
[5] New York Sec. of State, The Balloting Book & Other Documents Relating to Military Bounty Lands in the State of New York, Packard & VanBenthuysen, Albany, 1825. https://www.tcpl.org/node/5244
The Boating Genealogists 