Very late last night--trust me VERY late!--I felt compelled to write about my Aunt Annie and so I turned on my computer again and typed away. After a number of paragraphs I knew better than to continue and so I went to bed. But all day long today I was nagged not by Aunt Annie but by Uncle Will. You see, I had already written a story about him over 50 years ago! It was when I was in the tenth grade in 1947 and the assignment was to write about “An Interesting Ancestor of Mine.” Well, I wrote about my great uncle Will instead, and apparently the teacher wasn’t all that fussy about the genealogical accuracy of it in that it seems that I got 100% on the assignment! This is almost word-for-word what I wrote. However, I did make the corrections that the teacher had red-penciled in! Please keep in mind that this was written by a 15-year-old girl! (Tee, hee!) On May 16, 1859, in York Springs, Adams County, Pennsylvania, John William Riley, my great uncle, was born. I’ll skip a few years and say that nothing unusual happened to him until the age of four. It was at that time that Lincoln made his Gettysburg address and it was Uncle Will’s good fortune to be there at the time it was presented. After his speech, I suppose Lincoln went through the crowd, for Will said that Lincoln came up to him, patted him on the head and asked him how he was. It was also in that year that General Grant was in Gettysburg when Will was there and it was Will’s luck to see him, too. I have no idea as to the education Will had, but at the age of twenty-five he joined the circus and was billed as “See the strong man have a huge rock broken on his chest with a sledge hammer.” Yes, that’s what he was for about seven years. He traveled all over the United States, into Cuba, Mexico and Canada with the circus. But it was while the circus was performing in Gettysburg that he met and married my Aunt Annie. After he had married, he broke up with the circus and started stage and medicine shows of his own. They lived in Atlanta, Georgia, for quite a number of years, but as they got older, they decided to settle down in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He worked in the Baltimore Locomotive Works for quite a long time and then as a gardener for some wealthy family nearby. He retired at the age of seventy and for about ten years he did odd jobs around the neighborhood. When he was seventy-five years old, one day the chimney caught on fire and he climbed up to the second story roof to throw water on the blaze. After he had put it out and had started to descend, his foot slipped and he fell onto the first floor roof and then rolled off onto the ground. The miraculous part about it was that there were no bones broken and that he was just knocked unconscious for awhile. At the age of eighty he became ill and died at the age of eighty-five in 1944, one year after Aunt Annie had passed away. End of story. Now here’s the unusual thing about the story. It had been packed away among my school souvenirs all this time and recently when I was rummaging through my precious trunk, I came across it and was totally startled by the information it contained. You see, I never KNEW that! Not only that, but when I called one of my aunts in PA to check into his past further, I found that she didn’t know ANY of that either!! Now, where did I get such detailed information? Frankly, I haven’t the foggiest clue! I seriously doubt that my mother told me. Therefore, it must have been Grandma, Aunt Annie’s sister, who told me. But when? Grandma lived in PA and we lived in NY and I had an English assignment to write about! CERTAINLY, we didn’t have a long distance telephone conversation on the subject! Heavens to Betsy, one didn’t make long distance calls to just chitty-chat!! Was Grandma up here visiting with us when the assignment came up? I can only assume that was the setting. But you know, for the life of me I can’t even remember having such a conversation with her. But, nonetheless, what a 15-year-old girl wrote for an English assignment 50 years ago is now the only documented history of John William Riley that the family has! vee