Frazier Farmstead Museum

Sneaking in another post before I head back to my office tomorrow after a long weekend break. Happy 2012!

Below is the link to a nice video tour of the Frazier Farmstead where my mother, Brenda Steunenberg Richards (shown below next to the house circa 1925), spent time as a young girl with her aunts and uncles. I found the video tour on YouTube and shared it over the holidays with local family and might as well post it here too. This part of the family is on my Grandma Francis Beardsley Wood Steunenberg’s side (Beardsley/Frazier/Simpson).

I set the video link so that it starts just before you see the Cross my mother is pictured with come into view. Pictures of kinfolk can be seen on the wall along the stairwell. The video is a good tour of each room, the contents and grounds. The Cross sits in the stairwell of the house that you see from the outside over my mothers right shoulder. Always thinking of you mom.

Video Tour Frazier Farmstead Museum

After we visited the Farmstead in 2005, Diane Biggs (director of the museum) helped preserve a great memory with this article on the website. I have linked it to the blog before so you may have seen it. The Cross Story

The Beardsley/Frazier/Simpson side of the family probably needs a separate blog of their own as quite a bit of history here too and I have only briefly mentioned it on this site. Thanks to one of our kinfolk, Patrick Simpson, a lot has been documented in the book Whither Thou Goest. My mother cherished that book and I have always been pleased that Patrick documented our history and she had the opportunity to read it before her passing.
Here are a couple other photos (circa 1925) from our family album taken on the same day as the one with the Cross. That is my grandmother Francis Steunenberg on the right. In the picture on the left my mother is holding a "Ragtime Rastus"—probably from the old Victrola in the house. We don't know what happened to the original but I later bought a genuine Ragtime Rastus for my mom that I now have on display at our house. And wouldn't you know it, here is a sample of Ragtime Rastus in action from YouTube. Perhaps not politically correct today but you can see why most children would have been enthralled watching Rastus dance on the Victrola.

Here is the main link to the Frazier Farmstead Museum

One of my blog entries from Saturday, August 16, 2008: Private Lewis Simpson, Company K of the Eighty-ninth New York Volunteers.

And my Fold3 (formerly Footnote.com) pages about Private Lewis Simpson and one about his brother Private Justus Simspson.

On to 2012 and new discoveries....