Descendants

Each of the children of Asa Hartshorn also had children, then grandchildren, and on, but the enumeration is well beyond the scope of this website. If there exists Facebook pages or websites that include them, please respond on the Feedback page so the data can be shared.

Of the many descendants, a large number attended a Hartshorn-Bartlett reunion in 1949, in which most were either Hartshorns or Bartlett’s (offspring of Asa’s daughter Jennie and her husband Merton Bartlett), and it was held at the house of a daughter of Jennie, Gladys Bartlett, who married a Clisham. The first image below is that of the attendees, each with a number applied. The second image is the list of known names of attendees. The author & webmaster, Ralph Roe, is included. We have re-established contact with the Bartletts and Clisham’s, thanks to a coordinated effort between Larry Bartlett, Leslie Bartlett, Steven Bartlett, and Sylvia Parker Jantzen (author’s first grade classmate whose grandmother married a Bartlett.)

How can it be, the author-webmaster – a living great-grandson of Asa who was born 196 years ago?

How it it possible that Asa Hartshorn has elderly descendants living today who are his great-grandchildren? These living descendants have a great-grandfather who went to California during the historic Gold Rush which started in 1850, 175 years ago!

The answer is in a series of unusual sequential occurrences which are listed below:

1. Asa married late in life, partly because he spent four years of youth in California, then participated in an oil drilling venture in Pennsylvania, and finally decided to buy a farm. Also, his Lebanon NY residence area had a small population from which to choose a wife, for whom he needed a viable career to support, and eventually purchased a farm.

2. Asa’s first wife died a few years later, most likely as a result of childbirth complications. 

3. Asa remarried and had three children

4. His second son, Ryal, contracted a critical case of polio as a youth that caused a lack of control in one ankle, and that disability was serious enough to make it difficult to earn a living in a mostly dairy farming community, as well as difficult to find a spouse.

5. Ryal’s daughter was not the first-born, and during her child-bearing years the Great Depression occurred which resulted in an 8 year gap between child #2 and child #3 (the author).

6. The author is one of Asa’s several living great-grandchildren. 

The author knows young people today who have a living great-grandparent, whereas Asa died some 30 years prior to my birth.

There are many cousins living today, each with a story, but it is beyond the scope of this website to recognize each, and there are many who are in unknown locations, and efforts to contact some families, in particular the descendants of Jenny Hartshorn Bartlett, have been fruitless. If any reader knows any descendants who are not mentioned in this website, add a comment in the menu under Feedback.

WHY ONLY THE AUTHOR-WEBMASTER STORY IN DESCENDANTS IN YEAR 2025?

We do not know the details, in any depth, of the other Roe’s who are descended from Asa, nor the other Hartshorn’s or Bartlett’s, nor other cousins.  Such information is way beyond the scope of this website. It would take a lengthy separate website to present all their stories.

However, there is a method to fix this quandary, which is available to everyone. Some non-tech friends have created individual blogs and made them open to the public. There are many hosts available for them to set up blogs easily. Both YouTube and an internet search have several posts on how anyone can proceed.

The limited information this author can research, and post, makes available some background on his own family.

The author-webmaster Ralph Roe married an elementary schoolteacher Eleanor Harmon of Illinois, and resided in California until about a decade ago when they made a move to Southwest Virginia. Two children from the marriage, Renee and Bryan, graduated from California colleges and both are residing in California and are doing well in their careers, Bryan, by coincidence. lives close to the Gold discovery site at Coloma. There are two granddaughters Allison and Grace, and hopefully future great-grandchildren, and all of them will have access to this website to understand their origins. They were an inspiration for the completion of this website to keep them informed.