History is never finished.

Generations is a growing archive of writing, photographs, family history, oral tradition, language, literature, and historical research spanning generations.

As that work continues, new evidence appears. Old newspapers become searchable. Documents emerge from archives. Family photographs and diaries come down from attics. Church records, deeds, military papers, maps, census records, manuscripts, and other primary sources allow us to return to stories we thought we already knew.

Sometimes a new document confirms a story passed down for generations.

Sometimes it adds an entirely new chapter.

And sometimes it shows us that something we previously believed was wrong.

We believe those discoveries—and those corrections—belong in the record too.

January-September 2026

While going through family materials at our home in Greenfield, we discovered three large albums of old Dunham family photographs along with the 1923 diary of Marion Edna Dunham Mann.

These materials are now becoming part of the continuing reconstruction of our family's history in Greenfield and the surrounding Saratoga region.

Like so many discoveries that have shaped Generations, they had been preserved within the family for more than a century, waiting to be examined again.

READ MORE: STILL HERE — HENRIETTA ELIZA HOBBS DUNHAM

One of our recent genealogical investigations required us to reconsider an identification that had been repeated in later family histories.

The surviving record identifies Lytje Van Slyck as a daughter of Jacques Cornelissen Van Slyck and Grietje Harmense Ryckman, living in 1697.

She should not automatically be confused with her aunt, Hilletje Cornelise Van Slyck, daughter of Cornelis Antonissen Van Slyck and his Mohawk wife, who married Pieter Danielse Van Olinda and is considerably better documented in the seventeenth-century record.

Although Lytje may ultimately prove to have been a form of Hilletje, we have not yet located a contemporary record establishing that identification.

Until stronger evidence appears, Lytje is the historically safer name.

This is exactly the kind of distinction Generations will continue to make as better evidence becomes available.

READ THE REVISED VAN SLYCK RESEARCH

Alongside Marion Edna Dunham Mann's 1923 diary came another remarkable discovery: three large Dunham family photograph albums, uncovered while working in the attic of our old family home on Splinterville Hill.

The albums preserve generations of the interconnected Mann, Dunham, Thayer, Spear, Braley, Hill, Bowman, and neighboring families whose lives crossed between Vermont and Greenfield, New York. Many of the photographs had been resting above us for more than a century.

They are doing more than putting faces to names. The photographs provide visual and handwritten evidence of relationships we had previously known only through censuses, vital records, family stories, and scattered historical documents. In several cases, they have helped us recognize connections that had been forgotten entirely.

READ MORE: Still Here, Still Thayer

Our recent work has also led us back through decades of newspaper articles, correspondence, photographs, legal records, and family papers documenting Abenaki history in Vermont and much more—materials that preserve voices and events sometimes difficult to recover from later accounts alone. Records maintained in a half dozen file cabinets curated over the last 60 years by Joseph and Carol Bruchac. We now call the Bowman-Bruchac Family Archive.

Among the most remarkable documents to emerge from our family archive is a January 5, 1993 letter from poet Allen Ginsberg to the Vermont Supreme Court. Ginsberg had read the Court's 1992 decision concerning Abenaki land claims and wrote directly to the justices protesting its reasoning. The original letter survived in our family papers at Splinterville Hill.

Its rediscovery adds another contemporary voice to the documentary record surrounding the long struggle over Abenaki land, recognition, identity, and historical memory in Vermont. Along with period newspapers and other correspondence preserved in the archive, it reminds us why returning to the documents themselves matters: sometimes an event remembered only generally becomes much clearer when we can once again hear the people who were responding to it at the time.

READ: Meetings with Allen Ginsberg: Reclamation and Erasure

Another recent reexamination produced an important correction to our reconstruction of the DeVoe and Van Antwerp families.

Earlier versions of our genealogy placed Hester Ann DeVoe, born at Schaghticoke in 1791, in our direct ancestral line. We also treated her son Daniel Wynant Van Antwerp, who married Susan Atty Maria Conklin, as our direct ancestor and identified Alice Van Antwerp as their daughter.

The records show that this was incorrect.

Hester remains our relative, but through a collateral branch. Daniel Wynant Van Antwerp and Susan Atty Maria Conklin are likewise collateral relatives rather than our direct ancestors.

Our corrected direct line runs through a different Wynet/Winant Van Antwerp, born about 1829, who married Susan Rebecca Barney. Their daughter Alice Van Antwerp married Louis Bowman, continuing our direct Bowman line.

READ UPDATED RESEARCH: STILL HERE — HESTER ANN DEVOE: THE LINES THAT ENDURED

Our investigation of the Cole family of Saratoga and Schaghticoke produced another significant correction.

An earlier genealogical reconstruction we had relied upon identified Ebenezer Cole and Ruth Churchill of Massachusetts as the parents of Hannah, or Annetje, Cole, who married Captain Holtham Dunham.

Newly examined Revolutionary-era evidence instead identifies Nicholas Cole of the Saratoga Patent as Hannah's father and Hendrick Cole as her brother.

The discovery substantially changes the family's historical context.

Rather than placing Hannah primarily within a Massachusetts genealogy, the contemporary evidence places her family directly within the complicated Revolutionary-era world of Saratoga and Schaghticoke.

READ: FROM SCHAGHTICOKE TO SPLINTERVILLE HILL

Some discoveries do more than correct a name or relationship. They change our understanding of an entire family story.

Records preserved among the John Stark Papers revealed an extraordinary episode involving our ancestor Captain Holtum, Holtham, or Holton Dunham during the American Revolution.

An Examination of Holtum Dunham, dated August 16, 1781, and surviving court-martial proceedings from September 17–29, 1781, place Dunham and members of the Cole family within a military investigation concerning alleged communication with the enemy.

The documents opened an entirely new line of research into the intelligence networks operating between Saratoga, Schaghticoke, the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, Lake George, and Canada during the final months of the Revolution.

They also forced us to return to another family story: the capture of the Loyalist Thomas Lovelace.

EXPLORE THE COLE–DUNHAM FAMILY RESEARCH

Our earlier reconstruction also required an important family correction.

The Dunham associated in later Saratoga accounts with the dramatic capture of Loyalist Thomas Lovelace was Hezekiah Dunham, brother of our ancestor Captain Holtham Dunham.

Holtham is our direct ancestor; Hezekiah is his brother.

That distinction became particularly important once we discovered that Holtham himself was being examined and later court-martialed during the same extraordinary period in which the Lovelace affair unfolded.

READ: “SURRENDER OR YOU ARE ALL DEAD MEN!”

Recent work on the families of Greenfield, Middle Grove, Fox Hill, Splinterville, and the surrounding Saratoga region has also begun connecting stories that previously appeared separately in Generations.

The Dunhams, Bowmans, Van Antwerps, Barneses, Barneys, Colsons, Johnsons, and other neighboring families appear repeatedly in censuses, maps, cemeteries, property records, newspaper accounts, photographs, family traditions, and the history of regional industries such as basketmaking.

As these connections become clearer, older articles may be revised and linked together so readers can follow these families across generations rather than encountering them as isolated stories.

EXPLORE: FROM SCHAGHTICOKE TO SPLINTERVILLE HILL