As Luck Would Have It

The tiny hamlet of Lake Hill in New York State’s Catskill Mountains was my mother’s hometown, and her ancestors there, the Howlands, could trace their family history to its roots in Fifteenth Century England and to Bishop Richard Howland of Peterborough who officiated at the burial of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587.  During the next century, Henry Howland sailed to the Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts in 1623 to join his brother John who had landed there three years earlier aboard the “Mayflower.”  Some of Henry’s descendants then made their way across New England to the Mid-Hudson Valley where Edward Howland arrived in Lake Hill during the early part of the Nineteenth Century.  In 1910, Edward’s granddaughter Madge met and married a young Virginian named Julius Augustus Simpson who had just made his way north from Aldie in Loudoun County.

The young man, who most in the family always called Uncle Jules, established Lake Hill’s only general store and later became its postmaster.  As a child, I greatly enjoyed the tales Uncle Jules told me of his father’s exploits as a Confederate soldier during the War Between the States.  Few in the family actually believed those tales, but many years later while researching my various family histories, I found that Uncle Jules’ stories were all true.