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. Another married John Wallace who then became our farm’s owner.

• 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 was 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’.

• 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) Morse 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 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 as 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 mother raised 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 did John Wallace get the farm after marrying Andrew Finley’s granddaughter, and did the farm ever passed out of family hands? Fullerton names and Westmoreland County 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.