Part of the enjoyment of working on the Halfway Brook Books is meeting and corresponding (almost always by email) with relatives and descendants of the people who once lived in The Town of Highland or nearby.
So you might understand my excitement this past weekend at meeting both past and future contributors in person.
On Saturday I visited with Marion, Russ and Peggy (pictured above) in Scottsdale. Marion used to live in the Town of Highland and her family owned Handsome Eddy Farm. Marion knew my mother’s family.
Russ grew up in Pond Eddy and his wife Peggy’s family stayed at one the boarding houses near Highland Lake each summer. I happily listened to their stories from the 1920s through the present.
It will take another post to tell the story of my almost cousin John (a major contributor to Echo Hill and Mountain Grove) who visited Gary and I here in Cave Creek on Friday.
John’s first email arrived around February 2010. He answered a question I had written the previous year on my family site: Who was Emily Waidler who wrote a letter in 1944 to my great-aunt Aida Austin and called her cousin?
This was the start to unravel the Austin/Schoonover/Parker mystery.
