Mike's Genealogy Site

Going through some papers that I got from cousins Betsy and Celia, I came across this travelogue written by my great aunt Lenna about a trip that she took with her brother Dave Bloom (my grandfather), her then-husband Milton Gray, and her sister Anna in August of 1921. In the course of reading the story, I realized that one of the home movies that I had digitized a few years earlier was taken on this journey, so this puts the film into some nice context. When my mother narrated the video, she apparently didn’t know the details.

They took a trip by horse and buggy from the family “farm” in West Norwood, New Jersey, up to Albany (about 140 miles away) and returned by way of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Lenna refers to the horse as “Susse” (which is Hebrew for horse), although she notes that the horses real name is Cicero. In the narration of the video, my mother refers to the horse as “Dobbin”, but I think that she may have had this horse confused with another one, since Cicero died a year after this trip, when my mother was only two years old.

The trip included stops in Tappan, Piermont, Nyack, Haverstraw, Iona Island, West Point, Garrison, Cold Spring, Beacon, Poughkeepsie, Highland, West Park, Kingston, Woodstock, Saugerties, Catskill, Athens, Coxsackie, Albany, Castleton, Volatia, Chatham, Spencertown, North Egmont, South Egmont, Sheffield, Cannan, Cornwall Bridge, Kent, Pauling, Brewster, Katonah, Croton Falls, and Mt. Kisco.

Here is her story, along with a map of the trip and the video. If you prefer to read the story as a PDF instead of the animation at the bottom of the page, click here.

Enjoy!

- Mike Rothschild