Gateway First Four Years and More - 1969 and onward

Looking in

http://books.google.com

for

"William Yates" Sapperton -

I found the following about William Yates and his son Arthur on page 461

I will post a link below the image. The book is freely available -- you could download the PDF if you want to see more of it.

http://books.google.com/books?id=I-I-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA461&dq=%22William+Yat...

These days I live in Morris, NY. I was trying to trace the land that my house is on back to the time that it was in the hands of the Oneida tribe of the Iroquois and come up with a list of owners from them to me.

I have been doing some research on my family. My grandfather's grandather according to family lore, Samuel Thomas, fought in the Civil War. From my research I got the impression that he served with the 24th Regiment NJ Volunteer Infantry. Going with that I looked for records related to his service. I did find that a Samuel Thomas, rank of private in Company A of that regiment had applied for a pension. The image of the pension card that gave me hope of locating him after 1870 is attached. -- Sure looked like Samuel J. Thomas to me.

It was over a year ago that I learned about a web site named Find A Grave.

Now, at first blush, you might not think that Find A Grave is some place that you want to visit.

I mean, who wants to go looking for a grave? What plans do we have? Do we need to be searching for a grave today?

Find A Grave doesn't help you find a grave for yourself or your relatives.

Instead it helps you find the graves of your relatives or anyone else that you think you are interested in knowing more about it/

My older sister, Debbie Thomas, graduated from Gateway in 1969.

She was a good sister. Small cell kidney cancer got her in 2007. We all miss her.

You can read more about her at this site we made for her.

http://rememberingdebbie.blogspot.com/2007/11/deb-jeff-and-becki-at-debs...

Finding some of the places that my ancestors lived.

***** Update *****
Found a photo of William Finley, the father of Chester Alexander Finley - husband of Beulah M. Van Leer. I don't know much about the photo, as far as when it was taken or who the little girl was. I think that the photo was taken late in the life of William Finley, 1849 - 1935.

Chester "Pop" Finley was my great-grandfather. I realize now that I didn't really lay out the whole genealogy -- as I understand it -

Here's an image the lays it all out.

Jack let word out that he was going to be performing a one man play in August in NYC. Through a fortunate turn of events I was able to attend and even record the audio of his play. Below I am quoting the notice about the play that Jack put on his blog about the play.

They never collected the tickets at Woodstock. I bought mine in advance and brought them home with me.

Bob Harvey drove a station wagon, Alan Stahl, Jack Papovich, and I went along. Astronauts had just walked on the moon and come home. The world was changing.

Bob Thomas

A warm September day this first day of school. My first day in Gateway Regional High School just a few yards down the road from my home.
I don't have to rush to get ready, the school is right behind my house, so I stay in bed for as long as I can, savoring the last minutes of summer vacation.
There is no way to prepare for this, to be thrown into a new building with hundreds of other kids from four different towns, four different worlds.
I and everyone else will be creating something new in this rectangle of bricks and mortar, rising up from what used to be Mr. Rizzuto's field.

I had dropped out of my first semester at Rutgers Camden. I didn't like college at all, and I had no idea what to do in life. I had a vague ambition about being an actor, but not the foggiest idea how to go about it. I took a job with the company I had worked for during the past two summers, unskilled labor unloading trucks, and then I ended up emptying trailer loads of magazines at the post office building near 30th Street Station in Philly. It was a dirty, thankless job, but it was easy and I was on my own and unsupervised.

"A dugout, Marie", I said. "A dugout, not a canoe. A canoe is a whole 'nother level of culture."

A dugout is a log with part of the log removed.

Here's a link to a photo of a few dugouts

http://img2.photographersdirect.com/img/5171/wm/pd1270363.jpg

These were about the size of the one that I was ferried across the Niger River on when visiting a friend in the Peace Corps in Niger in 1977.

On Saturday May 3rd, 2009, my grandson, Mason, asked to have his training wheels taken off his bike. His father, Aaron, being a really good father, broke away from the job he had started of getting the boat out of the barn and readying it for the new season.

Jack Wiler has a blog - not really news now - but he listed the hit tunes of 1965 and I thought that it would be fun to list them with links to youtube vids of them - with the sound of course... His blog is

http://jackwiler.blogspot.com

I don't think we had all these 45s at my house and my sister loved to listen to records.

I don't have this many now. There may only be one 45 rpm record in the house and it is not a hit.

But I can listen to them when I please long as no one takes my internet awaaaay --- sort of like don't take my kodachrome away.

Recently I have taken an interest in Genealogy - fortunately some of my relatives have also. One of them used her/our family history in writing her master's thesis. Her name is Karen Lynn (Gant) Heiser. She is a graduate of and an employee of Rowan University. She grew up in Glassboro, NJ.

You can click on the link to download the Word Doc that she created. I recommend downloading the link and then opening the file. Enjoy!

Gant Genealogy

more from Ruth Hammell

EARLY YEARS AT GATEWAY:

Mr Wilkinson was one of the best teachers I can ever remember

The art room was a haven and favorite place to escape to, Thanks to Cindy Smith.

Ruth Hammell, '69, sent this to Bob Thomas via Facebook at 10:00am February 6

Advantages of being the 1st graduating class from Gateway:

1. We were "upper classmen" in Freshman Year.
2. Could play Varsity sports in Freshman Year.
3. We had a big huge brand new school all to ourselves in the beginning.
4. Graduated in the illustrious year of "69.

Can't think of too much else , but maybe some others out there could add to this list.

5. We weren't confined to a bunch of traditions passed down from previous classes.
6. Got to be the big fishies in a very small and safe pond.

So, you may be asking, did this really happen?
Yeah, it happened, alright.
I and a bunch of friends went out for an afternoon of fun and instead we got caught up in a murder-suicide; a personal tragedy with really bizarre overtones.
A young man my age was so troubled that he was able to convince himself and two of his closest friends that he should die, and they made it happen.
I was troubled that summer too, and so were many young men my age who still worried that their lives would be cut short by being sent to Vietnam.

Michael. That was his name, the name of the young man who convinced himself that he needed to die a violent death in order to serve Satan and command a legion of demons. He not only convinced himself, he managed to talk his two friends into tying him up and throwing him into a lake, and then walk away from it like nothing happened.
So I had found the body of a Satan worshiper who wished to die a violent death.
He died a violent death with the help of his friends.
Think about it.
Think real hard.

It was hard to believe the truth, but there it was. A 20 year old young man was dead, and I had found his body floating in a lake in an abandoned sand quarry.
This young man was murdered, but not murdered.
It was a sort of suicide, but with a little help from some friends.
I couldn't believe what the newspapers were saying.
This guy from Vineland had convinced his two teenage friends to tie him up and throw him into a lake so he could die a violent death. He needed to die violently, he told them, so he could serve Satan and command a legion of demons.