Excerpt from “Answering the Call”:
“One day in my childhood, a large package arrived at our rural Oregon home from my paternal grandparents in Burlington, Iowa. Perhaps the idea for this book began to form when the photo that now graces its cover was removed from that box and our father announced that this was his grandfather who had fought in the Civil War. Seeing that photo of my great-grandfather in his Civil War uniform, astride a beautiful white horse, and realizing that my father had known and loved this man, created a connection to U.S history that I could never have gained from school lessons.
“History began to come alive for me that day. For the first time I realized that people in the wars we studied in school were real people. I became aware that my people had lived through those wars.
“I had been fortunate to hear the history of my Huguenot and Dutch ancestors who had settled in the Hudson River Valley, and specifically in New Paltz, from our father and from letters written to me by Ken Hasbrouck and by my great-aunt Kate (Elting) Riddle. Our family line, they explained, descended from the Dutch Jan and Jacomyntje Elting’s son Roelif who married Sarah DuBois, daughter and granddaughter of two of the French Huguenot Patentees of New Paltz, New York.
“Those letters came in response to an elementary school assignment in which I was to write about my family history.
“My father, James Everett Elting, a native Iowan, told me to write to “Huguenot Street” in New Paltz, New York and someone would send me the information. We lived in a rural river valley, a former Indian reservation, in Siletz, Oregon on the other side of the country from New York. But there really was a “someone” who would answer a child’s inquiry—Kenneth Hasbrouck—the New Paltz man who is credited with organizing the effort to save our New Paltz stone houses, following the vision of the ancestors who had created the Huguenot Patriotic, Historical and Monumental Association of New Paltz in 1893.
His dedication led to the fulfillment of the dream to preserve our treasured Historic Huguenot Street. The informative letter from Ken that magically appeared in my mailbox included a list of all my ancestor grandparents from the first Elting couple married in this country—Jan and Jacomyntje—to me! What an amazing gift for a ten-year-old child.
Tags: Answering the Call!, Ken Hasbrouck, New Paltz, New York history
