#40 - Rensselaerville Update

 This week, dear reader, I am so very excited to share with you some updates that have been brewing over the past few months. 

Some of you may remember the Rensselaerville Letters, a project I work on intermittently outside work and the Ryves Holt/Lewes project. I wrote about it here, way back in January. This is the brief intro I gave the RVille Letters back then:

A family project - 19th century letters between members of the Nile Family in Rensselaerville, NY. These dozen or so letters belong to my father’s half-sister’s family. Several years ago my aunt sent me digitized versions of the letters; this was right after I finished graduate school and sort of broken from historical work. However, the letters helped to reignite my passion for research and uncovering stories from the past. Unfortunately, my aunt passed away in 2020, but my cousins have deemed me the ‘family historian’ and I will carry on. My aunt and her children come from an old New York family. Well, not too old, but family lore says that one ancestor travelled to New Netherlands with Peter Minuit, he of New Amsterdam fame. The English side of the family can be traced at least as far back to Robert and Deborah Cook; somewhere they have the Marriage License and Family Record from 1785. 

The letters, of course, are a few generations down, covering the 1840s through to the 1860s. They feature conversations between a group of Nile siblings and their cousins. They are connected to the Civil War, the Gold Rush, the Anti-Rent Wars, the California Supreme Court, and oddly enough Nebraska. I also discovered so many small comments that tied to much greater historical narratives. One sibling complains about mysticism, another complains about her sister taking a dress she shouldn’t have, and yet another describes parts of very early San Francisco.

When I wrote the post in January, I had digital versions of 13 letters. They spanned decades and topics. I knew theoretically that there could be more letters in RVille (maybe at the historical society?) or perhaps with one of my cousins. I hoped that more existed somewhere, at the very least if these 13 letters could be found it would be amazing to have access to them. I wanted to transcribe the letters and share them with people, maybe publish an article about them. They’re such an interesting view into family life and contain personal reflections on so many events during the 19th century. 

Fast forward from January to March when my father forwarded me an email. It had been sent to my dad and our cousins from a David Comstock of California seeking any information about my Aunt Janet and the family letters. It turns out that since the 1980s, David Comstock had been collaborating with my Aunt and her mother Frances, culminating in a couple books written about the RVille letters, focusing on the Californian adventures. ...But he was concerned for the location of hundreds, if not thousands of letters. OMG does not even begin to cover my astonishment to learn how many letters had survived. I had to find them. I, of course, quickly contacted my cousins to ask about David Comstock and the letters, telling them about how I had been helping my Aunt (their mother) and would dearly love to help in any way with the letters. 

A few weeks passed and I found myself driving 6 hours to pick up 12 boxes of letters from my cousins! They were extremely pleased to learn I was interested in the letters and wanted to preserve them. They were so pleased to have their closet space back and were more than happy to fob off the boxes to me. I am now the proud Guardian of the Letters (thanks for the nickname, Cuz), with at least 1200 letters sitting in my office. It's September and I’m still not done with a basic inventory. We’ll get into that next week.

But that’s not all! I started a lovely conversation with David, assuring him that the letters made it safely into my custody and that I am more than happy to help him when he needs to find something. He had an old typed inventory for me to use as a jumping off point, but it wouldn’t help me physically locate a specific letter in the 12 boxes. David has written three books involving some of the RVille Letterwriters, namely Niles Searls, Charles Mulford, Mary Niles, and Cornelia Niles. Niles, Charles, and Mary moved to California during the Gold Rush and Niles eventually became a Chief Justice of California. He is of primary interest to David, who has a book about Niles coming out later this year or early in 2022. The other three books are Gold Diggers and Camp Followers, 1845-1851; Brides of the Gold Rush, 1851- 1859; and Greenbacks and Copperheads, 1859-1869. They are narrative history, where David uses the letters, newspaper articles, and other primary sources to tell the history of Nevada County, California, the Gold Rush, and the Letterwriters in a story-like fashion. They are an entertaining read, David clearly knows his stuff, but I hope my work, plans abound dear reader, will go further and help people access the letters themselves. In support of these plans, David thought I would be the best repository for more 19th century documents. He sent me a few dozen papers from William Allen, Cornelia Niles’ first husband who was a preacher. These papers document his drafts for sermons and speeches. 

So. In all, over the past several months I have gone from having 13 digital scans of letters, something less than 50 pages in total, to having something like 3,000 pages of primary documents!

...Now what the heck am I going to do?