The Road To Almond

How does a family come to a hill in a small New York town? This is the family history of the Dodges and Giffords, written for every Dodge and Gifford who wants to know where they came from, and it starts in Almond in July 1974, when a New York State Police trooper was laid to rest above the town.Following the records generation by generation, it travels from Almond and Hornell to the farms of Tioga County, Pennsylvania, and then to a fork in the road: two possible fathers for one man, and two possible histories. One leads through Poughkeepsie, Long Island and Block Island; the other through Oxford, Brookfield, Wenham, Beverly and the villages of Somerset. Alongside them runs the Gifford side, from Howard, New York back to Dartmouth, Sandwich and the Plymouth Colony.A full section, The Old Countries, turns to the places in Europe: the stone villages of Somerset, the Dodges of Stockport in Cheshire, the Giffards of Normandy, the English towns whose names crossed the Atlantic, and the Low Countries and the Rhineland.Written as narrative nonfiction, the book shows its evidence: census pages, obituaries, church registers, gravestones, draft cards, wills and genealogies are reproduced beside the people they describe, and every claim carries a confidence rating of high, medium or low. It sets out both Dodge lines fairly and lets the reader decide. Maps and a migration timeline trace the journey, a Who’s Who and an index keep the cast straight, a plain-language guide explains how a Y-DNA test could settle the question, and family record pages are left for your own photographs and stories. Other chapters examine the family tales of Jesse James and Native American ancestry, and the Dodge coat of arms and why it cannot be assumed.Illustrated throughout with painted scenes of the places and eras.