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Moss Family History: Julius Moss and Emeret Bartholomew

Emeret Bartholomew

His wife, my great-grandmother, was named Emeret Bartholomew. Her ancestor came to Boston and was a member of the first school board of Boston. His line can be traced back to 1550.

The names of their children were:

  • Ernest
  • Herbert (Our line)
  • William
  • *Titus, who died quite young
  • Bertha

*Titus died a day or two after a spanking he received at the little one-room schoolhouse located on the Milldale Road. The family was of divided opinion about the cause of his death. Some said it was caused directly by the spanking. Others were in doubt about it. His picture, (hand-tinted with him in a colorful little boy's dress), hung on the front room wall of the Moss Farms house for many, many years until sometime in the 1940's. It is now (1977) in the possession of Alta Storrs (nee Moss).

Julius died Feb. 28, 1922 and his tombstone is in St. Peter's Episcopal Church Cemetery, Cheshire.

I attended his funeral at St. Peter's Church and the church was not large enough to hold the people, most of whom must have been related to him. Two related families I remember meeting there for the first time were the Gaylords, who founded Gaylord Farm Sanatorium in Wallingford, and the Duvauls from Hartford. He had been a member of Connecticut Legislature at one time.

The following are two more stories that I remember his telling me.

Once or twice a summer when his father was alive, the family would drive down to the shore in a two-horse surrey to visit with a friend who owned a farm close to New Haven that included the shoreline between Branford Point and Sachem Head. It was the family's habit to bring back home bags of clams and oysters which they put in cool flowing spring water to be kept alive until they were all eaten. One season the friend offered my great-great-grandfather the whole farm for $1500. Grandfather Joel thought about it and considered that the land, being so near the salt water, was not all that good for farming so countered with an offer of $1200. It was not accepted, unfortunately, as grandfather Julius knew in 1918 that otherwise he could have been very rich indeed.

At a time when he and his father had some money to invest, they looked at some of the new industrial developments around the community. There were a couple of mills being started by men with old Connecticut family connections and then there was a button shop set up next to the railroad track in West Cheshire by an unlikely, foreign-looking man from New York. As it is easy to guess, the family quickly decided against the New York man as being a shifty, untrustworthy fellow and invested in the businesses of the solid Connecticut citizens. The result is history. The button shop man soon came out with a snap fastener for women's dresses which sold by the million, and the other businesses soon withered away to nothing. Grandfather wasn't bitter about it and took it all quite philosophically, but even he could never have dreamed how much Connecticut would change from the days of control by the families of the founding fathers.