Last evening the CCGS concluded its season with our Annual Meeting and
banquet. It was a time of friendly exchanges and celebration of accomplishments
during a successful year. Our speaker was Judge Tim Rudduck who spoke about his
life story, how he became a judge, and his U Turn docket for drug offenders. He also
shared recent discoveries about his own family history, as he has become more
interested in genealogy. He found a great-grandmother named Lydia Hadley
Rudduck, and Christine Hadley Snyder traced Lydia’s line back to early Quaker
settlers Jonathon T. Hadley and Rebecca Harvey Hadley, and found that he and
Christine are fourth cousins once removed. As honorarium for his program, she
presented him with a 198 year-old brick saved from the ruins of an 1825 house of
his gr-gr-gr-gr-grandfather Jonathon T. Hadley (1793-1879).
And it has been a successful 2022 for us. The library is more user friendly
now through efforts of that committee. Four Saturday events at the CCGS library
about our county’s 13 townships was something new and succeeded in bringing
new folks into our library. Our meeting programs were a balance of genealogical
instruction with sessions by Debbie Large and Dana Ann Palmer, and history:
Suzanne Madison about our town’s Carnegie Library and what can be found in the
Wilmington College Library Archives by Lee Bowman and Elizabeth House. We
enjoyed again our July picnic at Quaker Knoll. And then in August we had a well-
attended outing to Jim and Joan Burge’s salvaged and renewed 1884 Brown
Schoolhouse. There we had presentations about the local history (Brown Family),
county educational history, and detailed information about the several years of
work to save the schoolhouse and convert it to a modern meeting site and BnB.
But above and beyond all these events was the amazing evening of April 25
when along with the Historical Society we hosted Taylor Stuckert’s Wilmington
College Honors Symposium as they gave us “New Burlington Fifty Years After,
Looking Back”. Every seat was filled and all standing room was crowded into
including well down the hallway. The huge crowd included several folks who had
been forced to leave their homes and farms those 50 years ago when Caesar Creek
Lake was begun by the army corps of engineers. And one who had been there and
written a book about it, author John Baskin, spoke and answered many questions.
Although our genealogical library is closed now until March 2023 when the
History Center reopens, a core group of members plan to do volunteer work there
on Wednesday afternoons. All are welcome to come by and see if you can also find
some interesting project to help make our library better.
Worth repeating. From Leslie Holmes in the October 2018 “The Clinton
Chronicle”: “As the holiday season is soon to be upon us it is good to remember that
this is a great time to learn more about our family history or depending on where
you are on the family tree it may be a good time to share what you have learned.
Family stories may or may not be true, but they sure do get interest piqued. Share
those stories and traditions with the next generations.” A vehicle to get generational
interchange started is the Talking Point Cards “Generations”, a boxed set of 200
questions that children use to ask questions of grandparents or great grandparents. Available at Amazon, etc.
Happy Holidays! ‘Til Spring,
Gene Snyder
