Like the Philadelphia area, the Princeton area was home to the Lenape before it was colonized by Europeans in the late 1600s. I remember driving down a scenic tree-lined street looking at old houses and buildings. Little known fact: Princeton was the capital of the United States for five months in 1783.
I grew up in Seattle, Washington, first settled by Europeans in 1851, so visiting the East Coast was my first opportunity to see cities and towns at least three centuries old. Young by the standards of London or Rome, but old in the United States.
We continued on U.S. Route 206 6 miles (10 km) north to Belle Mead to visit the Harlingen Reformed Church, built in 1727. This was the church attended by my maternal 7th-great-grandparents Jan and Sarah (née Wyckoff) Van Arsdalen in the 1740s.
We also visited its cemetery, which was located several minutes away down a dirt road. We located the graves of numerous Van Arsdalens. There's nothing quite like a cemetery of that vintage for atmosphere, even on a bright, sunlit day. Though I could have done without being chased by a bee.
Then we took U.S. Route 206 and several county roads south 6 miles (10 km) to the junction with U.S. Route 1, which we followed 24 miles (39 km) northeast to Woodbridge.
Along the way, we stopped for lunch at a hamburger restaurant. I don't remember its name or exactly where it was located, but it wasn't a fast food restaurant. It was buffet style, so you would get a meat patty, then choose from several different types of buns and dozens of condiments. Building our own hamburgers was fun and tasty.
In Woodbridge, we stopped at Beth Israel Memorial Park, a large Jewish cemetery, where I visited the graves of my paternal great-grandparents, Isidor and Dora (née Schreiber) Gruber, for the first time. Some of the headstones were inscribed completely in Hebrew, but luckily theirs weren't or I wouldn't have located them without assistance.
They were immigrants from what's now Ukraine and Poland, and the soil they were buried in was so very far away from the soil they were born on. Isidor was born in 1881, and arrived at Ellis Island on 24 July 1903. He worked as a clerk after his arrival, until he entered the restaurant industry as a waiter and worked up to being a cook. Dora was born in 1891, and arrived at Ellis Island 23 July 1912. She worked as a dressmaker until she was married.
Grave of my great-grandfather Isidor Gruber (1881-1963)
Grave of my great-grandmother Dora Gruber (née Schreiber) (1891-1968)
Then we followed Interstate 95 33 miles (53 km) to The Bronx, New York, crossing over the Hudson River on the George Washington Bridge. We saw the Statue of Liberty and the skyline of Manhattan as we drove.
In the Bronx, several of the signs on the freeway were covered in graffiti to such an extent as to be difficult to decipher. Some parts of the Bronx had abandoned buildings and a general demeanor of despair. We relied on a good map, although we got lost once and had to stop to ask for directions. Our destination was St. Raymond's Old Cemetery, a sprawling Roman Catholic cemetery where my paternal great-grandmother Ethel Jackson Dee (née Mackintosh) was buried in February 1917.
My great-grandmother was born in Inverkeithing, Scotland in 1881. She was a domestic servant who immigrated to Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada in 1904, where she met and married my great-grandfather William Edward Anthony Dee, who was a barber. She came from a sectarian Scottish Protestant family, and some of her family disowned her for the "shame" of marrying an Irish Catholic.
My great-grandparents left Halifax for the Bronx in 1916. She died there a year later from a congenital heart defect at the age of 35, leaving behind a husband and two children. My great-grandfather was too poor to afford a headstone for her grave. The cemetery office provided us with the exact location of the grave, so we were able to find it, but it was notably the only grave in that row without a marker.
Grave of my great-grandmother Ethel Jackson Dee (née Mackintosh) (1881-1917),
note the absence of a marker
note the absence of a marker
Then we had the joy of trying to escape from New York City during the Friday afternoon rush hour. I wish now we'd stayed at least a day in the city for sightseeing.
We crept along Interstate 95 for 63 miles (101 km) northeast. By the time we cut off on Interstate 91 in Connecticut, traffic was a little better, and we continued 38 miles (61 km) north to Hartford, Connecticut.
We stayed at a Super 8 Motel that night, and ate dinner at a local restaurant which was similar to a Denny's.
Total Travel Distance: 271 miles (436 km)
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