Aunt Sukie was a short, chubby
woman, always laughing. Uncle Charles was a man of strong Irish
features, like Grandfather. He was a farmer who lived in Genesee
County. Uncle Martin was a farmer of fair intelligence; Ezekiel was
lower in the scale than the others; was intemperate, and after losing
his farm became a day-laborer. He would carry a gin-bottle into the
fields, and would mow the stones as readily as he would the grass--
and I had to turn the grindstone to sharpen his scythe. Uncle Edmund
was a farmer and a pettifogger. Uncle William died comparatively
young; he had nurseries near Rochester. Uncle Thomas was a farmer,
slow and canny, with a quiet, dry humor. Aunt Hannah married Robert
Avery, who drank a good deal; I can't remember anything about her.
Aunt Abby was large and thrifty; she married John Jenkins, and had a
large family. . . . Amy, my mother, was her mother's tenth child.
Mother was born in Rensselaer County near Albany, in 1808. Her
father moved to Delaware County when she was a child, driving there
with an ox-team. Mother "worked out" in her early teens. She was
seventeen or eighteen when she married, February, 1827.
Father and Mother first went to keeping house on Grandfather
Burroughs's old place--not in the log house, but in the frame house
of which you saw the foundations.
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