Beatty Cousins, A friend sent this to me along with the link to look around some more. Who knows? It could even be my own Beatty/Beaty family! Lois Kortering Erie Railroad Biography: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~sponholz/biojwbeatty.html James Beatty, Meadville, PA >From the November, 1907 issue of Erie Railroad Magazine (Meadville News): James Beatty, the veteran engineer, had a queer experience. Stepping from his engine to enter the Dispatcher's Office, he was run into by an Italian bicyclist, thrown down and had a hip dislocated. He was taken to Spencer Hospital and is slowly recovering. During the many years Mr. Beatty has railroaded he has never had any very serious mishap, and now to be used up by a bicyclist is rather galling to Jim. >From the December, 1907 issue of Erie Railroad Magazine (Meadville News): Engineer James Wallace Beatty, who for the past 15 years has been in the fast passenger service, is dead as the result of an accident noted in the November issue of the Magazine, when he was run into by a bicyclist. Mr. Beatty was a native of Meadville, where he was born October 25, 1840. In the fall of 1870 he began his railroad career as a brakeman, serving later as a fireman and getting his billet as an engineer in August, 1872. He was one of the most careful and painstaking men on the road, as well as a popular and deserving one. For several years he served as chaplain in his lodge of the B of LE, with whose members he was most popular. >From the January, 1908 issue of Erie Railroad Magazine: "It is an old saying among the Scotch that if "ye are to dee, ye'll dee," that a man dies when his time comes and in the way it was intended he should pass out. James W. Beatty, an Erie engineer, died at Meadville Monday, from the result of a fall on the sidewalk after 37 years' service on the railroad, two years as brakeman and 35 at the throttle. Estimating his daily run at 120 miles, 300 working days to the year, he travelled at least one and one-third million miles, faced millions of signals, an error in any one of which would have meant death, read thousands of train orders transmitted by thousands of operators and faced thousands of men running on duplicates of these orders, raced over switch-points by the hundred thousand, bridges and trestles innumerable. In other words, his chances of death by accident, reasonably probable, ran into the millions, yet he died from a cause that could just have naturally happened to a cobbler who never left the town he lived in. This not only witnesses to the old Scottish saying but speaks well for the discipline, care and skill of the railroaders." Reprinted from the Greenville, PA Advance