About the time of the 2002 gathering at our Pennsylvania farm, I summarized thoughts and comments on all those who may have passed through over the times since our ancestor Andrew Finley first settled on the farm, after serving with Washington in the revolution. The images at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/rpjhand@pacbell.net/slideshow2?.dir=a4ee&.src=ph&.beg=0&.spd=2 are meant to accompany that summary and are explained in bullet points and selected images below. These slides also include views of where those who passed through originated, albeit with a touch of poetic license, since much less is available from the mists of time than from recent periods.

Images are mostly chronological. Labels help understand their association with the Finley Farm. To view any of images in more detail, select Download and Open and then magnify if needed. This is most helpful for text, map and family tree slides. Following are comments that may add to an understanding of how our ancestors as well as others may have passed through the lands of our Finley Farm.

 Miriam Painter on the back porch swing and around the kitchen porch provides a fitting start and end to the images. For it was her ancestor who first settled on the farm. And it was through the remarkable coincidence of marrying into the family of the owners that she returned to her ancestral lands to live the rest of her life.

 Our family tree goes back to the Finleys in the 1500’s in Scotland. The Finleys continue back to Macbeth, Macduff, Duncan and Malcolm in the 1000’s, but how this relates to us isn’t as clear. However to conjure dreaming, an image of Malcolm III, who began the Scot line that ruled for several hundred years after Macbeth’s turbulent times recalls that shrouded era. And to broaden all the what ifs? We can wonder whether the Viking powers in the area at the time provided the first blood ties between my mother and my Norwegian father, centuries before being they found each other in our times.

 About the time of our Finley beginnings in Scotland, Shakespeare would have been writing of Macbeth five centuries before. The Scottish map of that era indicates the Cupar Angus locale where our Finleys probably had been for generations before. And the Fife parish map indicates Newburn of which our Balchristie hamlet was part. These places still exist on the modern Scotland map, along with Amargh in Ulster where our Finleys moved for a generation, as did many Scots before their immigration to the US.

 References and descriptions do exist of the many Eagle Wing voyages over the decades it brought Ulster settlers to Philadelphia, just as it did our ancestors John and Michael Finley in 1734. But no images of Eagle Wing exist. We do know that John Finley the immigrant John Finley had a son born in Pennsylvania whose name was John and was our Andrew Finley’s father. It was this John Finley who was first white to descend the Ohio River to Kentucky and return to regale whomever would listen of the alluring blue grass country, as indicated in the Appalachian and Trails West slides.

 We know of this John Finley with George Washington at Jumonville Glen when he started the French and Indian War, as well as at Fort Necessity. It would have been either then or the next year with Washington Braddock’s campaign when he would have fired the imagination of a young Daniel Boone about the lands beyond the mountains through nightly campfire stories. And of these times and places, we do have images.

 History tells us that it was John Finley who led Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap. But the John Finley who was father of our Captain Andrew, and who enlivened the campfires of Washington and Braddock as well as inspired Daniel Boone, was killed by Indians shortly after the French and Indian War. It would have been his oldest son John who remarkably showed up at the Boone cottage as a peddler indicating that he could lead Boone through the mountains to Kentucky. For a school project, our son Kevin summarized the Finley as well as our Morse and Wallace familyrelations.

 It is unclear whether it was his father’s self confidence showing or stories from his father, who had only heard of a mountain pass from its connection to the Warrior’s trace he traveled in Kentucky. It is also uncertain how he came to find Boone and whether either knew this John Finley was the son of Boone’s inspiration to go west. Despite Boone’s many past attempts and failures to find the pass, Finley and Boone spent the winter planning the journey and in the spring of 1767, Finley did find and lead Boone through what became the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky. It is this juxtaposition of coincidence, mystery and history that makes the ghost image most moving of the Cumberland slides. For me, that ghostly image will always be John Finley, father and son.

 Our next tie to both history and passing through our farm was Samuel Finley Breeze Morse, a NY portrait painter and inventor of the telegraph and Morse code. Even though he was a relative, he probably never passed through our Finley Farm, but his telegraph lines certainly did. One who married into our family became the most prominent of the branches of our family. John Wallace emigrated from Ulster in 1823, walked across Pennsylvania and ended up on our farm. He worked as a hired hand, married one of our Andrew’s daughters, settled on another farm and then took over our farm as indicated in the news article image, which validates that it was the exact farm of Andrew Finley that my grandmother returned to as a new bride in the early 1900’s.

 John Wallace’s son Henry wrote the book about growing up on our Finley Farm. After graduating from Jefferson College as did my grandfather some years later, Henry Wallace left the farm rather than came back to live on the farm as my grand parents did. Instead he headed west to fortune and fame in Iowa. Along the way he probably stopped to see his relative General Lew Wallace, who at the time would have been writing Ben Hur in Crawfordsville, Indiana. It was Henry’s grandson Henry who founded the first biotech firm as the Pioneer hybrid corn seed business in Iowa. He was later in FDR’s cabinet and served as Vice President from 1940-44. It would have been in 1930’s as FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture that my mother recalls him returning to her farm for a visit his ancestral farm.

 Ownership and blood relations after the Wallaces appear severed with the Pore and Painter ownership of the farm. But during this period, the titans of Pennsylvania industry would have passed through from Frick’s coke operations in Connellesville to Carnegie’s steel mills in Pittsburgh. Further north oil was discovered at Titusville and the boomtown of Oil City. Trains would have carried titans like Rockefeller and Carnegie through our farmland along with the coke, steel and oil. As we stand along those riverside tracks, still used today, we can imagine the great steam engines being supplied by water from the now severed dam and West Newton miners descending into shafts and my mother hearing them work under our farm.

* * *

Our farm may have had fleeting prospects for prominence in recent decades as a potential site for an air base after World War II and Volkswagen plant site a couple decades later. But these went elsewhere or didn’t materialize, so farm remained much as it may have been back in Finley and Wallace’s time through mid 20th century. As years passed, less farming was associated with all farms in the area. But the last images of grandmother and farm buildings in mid 1970’s may be a fitting bridge between all those who have passed through in ages past and what the land and place will be to generations to come.

Old Finley Farm of Westmoreland Country Pennsylvania

As we grow older and closer to the end than the beginning, it is natural to think more of all those who came before. Old genealogy records help us reconstruct lives of ancestors, but I have always found the lands on which they lived even more fascinating. Perhaps it’s because the land is always there, while people just pass through. As I recall, ‘Gone With the Wind’ summarized it as the red earth of Tara. Of the lands of our family, the place most set apart through which we have all passed is a tract known in history as the old Finley farm.

Family legend has it being given to a Captain Andrew Finley by George Washington for his service in the Revolutionary War, perhaps from lands Washington received as a surveyor years before. Whether fact or fantasy, we do know that George Washington would have passed through when his skirmish with the French in 1754 ignited the French and Indian War and he built Fort Necessity south of what would become our family farm. He would have passed through the following year on Braddock’s campaign to take Fort Duquesne from the French and make it Fort Pitt. And he would have passed through as a surveyor to make the maps we still have of the lands around the mouth of the Ohio River.

We have no blood ties to George Washington, as does my wife P.J.’s clan. Nor can we even go back as far as Pocohontas and John Smith floating by P.J.’s Virginia ancestral home. But our old Finley farm has had a distinguished parade of luminaries who have floated by or passed through. It’s of those I think as I stand on the hills and look over the same lands they passed through so long ago. And as I do, I dream of what it must have been like for:

 Michael and Archibald Finley and their families landing in Philadelphia on September 28, 1734 on the good ship Eagle Wing from Armagh in Northern Ireland. They were the first in our family to arrive in America and probably never got as far as our farm as they settled around Philadelphia in Chester and Bucks Counties. But their children certainly did. Michael’s son John, who is our Andrew’s father, lived in and had several of his children born or die in Westmoreland County.

 That first John Finley ancestor in America who first fired my imagination as I read history’s account of him as the Old Indian Trader to whom fell credit for the first confirmation of ‘Indian stories of the richness of what was to become the Mecca of pioneers a generation later, the bluegrass country of Kentucky.’ He would have floated by our farm as he descended the Youghiogheny, Monogahela and Ohio Rivers with his canoes of trading goods in 1752 to learn, after capture by the Shawnees, of the Cumberland Gap’s access to the fertile Kentucky lands.

 This same John in 1755 with George Washington as part of Braddock’s campaign to take Fort Duquesne. It was then that a young Daniel Boone was entranced by John’s nightly campfire tales of the wonders and perils of Kentucky and his travels and trading there. However, despite legend, if our John Finley was the Old Indian Trader and who introduced Boone to Kentucky and the Cumberland Gap, he most certainly did not lead him there years later. For John was killed by Indians the following year and died in Pennsylvania’s Cumberland.

 John’s son John, who as a good candidate for the Boone guide showed up at Boone’s cabin in 1769. They spent the winter planning the trip they took the next Spring through the Gap. This John was in Kentucky a couple years before, was still single, and was part of the famous John Thompson expedition to Kentucky in 1773. He is our Andrew’s brother, making Andrew brother to Boone’s guide and son of the Old Indian Trader. Some historians contend that Michael’s brother Archibald may have sired Boone’s guide, which would have meant that our ancestral link would be back a generation. But I’ll stick with the two Johns as Indian Trader and Boone guide, perhaps identifying with them after reading about John that ‘like his father, he had a tendency to wander’.

 George Washington may have been responsible for promoting the land awards for military service rather than directly giving our farm to Andrew. But we do know Andrew was on the land from after the Revolutionary War until his death in 1791. We can only imagine the effort to clear the land and turn it to a productive farm with all the limits of the American frontier life in those times. We can next imagine the generation of Andrew’s six daughters and two sons on the farm,. One of those daughters is our direct ancestor. The other the tie to next farm owners, the Wallaces.

 I mistakenly assumed the farm had been sold to the Wallaces in the 1800’s. Only recently did I piece together facts that made them relatives rather just another family passing through. And with our Wallaces as scions of two US Secretaries of Agriculture and a Vice President, there is less to imagine about their family history than ours. However, as with Michael and Archibald and families, I can dream about how it must have been for John Wallace arriving in Philadelphia in 1823 from Kilrea, Ireland and walking across Pennsylvania to find work in the only skill he knew, farming.

 Our direct ancestor Mary Finley married Walter Bell and moved to his nearby farm. Her sister Martha married Randall Ross and moved to another nearby farm. John Wallace may have worked on our farm for their father Andrew. A few years after Andrew died, John Wallace married Martha Randall’s daughter Martha, built the current farmhouse, and lived on the farm through the Civil War.

 John Wallace’s son Henry who was born on the farm in 1836 the only one of nine children to survive. He also doesn’t leave everything to the imagination as he left a lovingly written book on our farm with ‘its fat pork sausages and cream as thick as pancake batter’ The book was published in 1917 as ‘Uncle Henry’s Own Story of His Life’, a copy of which I understand exists somewhere in our family.

 But Henry longed to be elsewhere. So we can imagine him finishing West Newton High and Jefferson College and using his missionary training as his ticket West. Even though the Wallace’s built the existing farmhouse, we lose track of them until my Mother recalls Uncle Henry’s grandson showing up while he was FDR’s Agriculture Secretary shortly before be became Vice President.

 We can read about the fame of the Iowa Wallace’s in politics, agriculture and the Farm Journals they founded. But we can imagine 18 year old Henry leaving the farm and climbing abroad his first ever train to head west. We expect he stopped to see his cousin Lew in Crawfordsville, Indiana who, at the time would have been under the beech tree where he wrote most of Ben Hur. John ended up at Monmouth College to complete his ministerial degree. And we can muse about him being the eloquent exponent of farm life he became for the rest of his life without ever again living on a farm.

 As we return to thoughts of the farm and the changes and people it saw flow through, our dreaming turns to industrial America of the late 1800’s. Rockefeller would have turned North to Titusville rather than South to our rivers, but with railroads by then, he didn’t need rivers and wasn’t a relative in any event. Frick and Carnegie also weren’t relatives, but would have passed through from their coal and coke fires on Connelsville hillsides to their steel empires in Pittsburgh. As a direct descendent of our Michael Finley through his son Samuel, who was an early Princeton President, Samuel F(inley) B(reese) Morris probably didn’t pass through our farm, but his early telegraph lines might have. And his Aunt Polly Finley who married Davy Crockett probably didn’t see the farm, but Davy might have on a flatboat down the Ohio with Mike Fink.

 The steam behemoths of the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad would have passed through as they took on water from the now blasted out shell of a dam. I still remember hiking back through the woods to the dam as a kid with cousins and nostalgically returning to it years later with Tristan.

* * * *
So finally we reach the most stunning and phenomenal passing through of all. That would surely have to be the return of my Grandmother to her ancestral lands as the new wife in a family whose lands the Finley farm became after the Wallace’s. We know that John Wallace left during or shortly after the Civil War to join his son Henry in Iowa. The farm was sold to John Pore who toward the end of the century sold it to John Fullerton., my Grandfather John Thurman Painter’s grandfather.

My Grandmother Miriam Fluvenna Moore married Thurman Painter in 1917. He had graduated as a lawyer from Jefferson College, as did Henry Wallace. Unlike Uncle Henry, who headed West to leave farming, no one else in my Grandfather’s family seemed to want the farm, so he returned to it with my Grandmother, where they lived the remainder of their lives. The farm, where my Mother and her siblings grew up, remains the home of her brother and his son.

Other tales surely will be told about those who have passed through these fine lands. I recall Mother’s stories of all the coal miners who were heard passing under the land although they were seldom seen other than the busloads of miners from West Newton descending into the vertical shaft back by the dam. And I recall hearing of all the colored folks who always asked whether they could pick black berries in the stumpfield while the white folks never asked. And as I learned how little money there ever was, it was heartbreaking to hear of those who passed through to take turkeys just before they were ready for Thanksgiving sale.

Perhaps along with all the tales yet to be told or recalled of those who passed through will come answers to the still puzzling ties. How exactly are the Wallace’s related to our Finley’s and did the farm ever passed out of family hands? Fullerton names and Westmoreland Country ties in both Finley and my Grandfather Painter’s clan make this question even more intriguing. Hopefully all this will spark the interest of another generation about where we all came from and who all passed through, just as the Finely ramblings summarized above still keep me dreaming and imagining.

Your Comments, Corrections, Clarifications, Changes, Additions and Suggestions