"As American as Apple Pie" "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" "An apple for the teacher" "The apple of my eye" "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree" Food vector created by vextok - www.freepik.com The days are shorter, the air is crisper and it's apple harvest time.  If you drive along the Columbia River north of Wenatchee, WA with your car window down, you can smell the apples on their way to market! Apples have been a major part of my family's farming history.  From New Hampshire, through Vermont and Wisconsin, the Stowe and Dyer families were in apple growing country.  When Anna Wood Dyer proved the homestead land in Minnesota in 1881, the evaluation included over 700 apple trees. My great grandfather, Solomon Stowe, preferred apple pie for breakfast, my great grandmother, Mary Dyer Stowe, always had a supply on hand.  As a 4 year old child, my Aunt Ena was always sooo hungry when she went to Grandma's house

  Anna Wood Dyer Anna Wood Dyer Biography At a recent virtual meeting, someone asked if others had one ancestor who had inspired them either to start family history or to keep researching.  It didn’t take me long to think of my gggrandmother Anna Wood Dyer as my inspiration.  After briefly relating my discoveries about her, someone suggested she would make a good blog topic. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll dust off and update one of the biographies I’ve written about her.”  Looking back at the discoveries and development of her life story I realize something else—the timeline of my growth as a researcher.  Throughout this family history quest, Anna has been the most elusive with the least information available.  And yet, at this point I personally feel I know her better because I have had to learn so much about her environment and the events that must have impacted her life. Anna has never seemed like a brick wall, only a weight bearing wall around which a family grew.  I can se

Puritan Clothing Currier and Ives; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division We are approaching a monumental 400th anniversary: the landing of the Mayflower Pilgrims in November, 1620.  They were followed by the Puritan settlements beginning in 1621 and through the Great Migration years, all nearing the 400 year anniversary. Maybe it is due to our childhood education that the month of November brings up visions of the first Thanksgiving.   The Mayflower Pilgrims are some of the most iconic figures in American history. One glimpse of their black clothes and buckled hats and you automatically know who they are . But those images are not completely accurate.  The Pilgrims and Puritans are often represented as wearing black or grey clothing but in reality they seldom wore black, preferring to wear what they called “sadd” colors.  These included green, rust, orange, purple, brown and other colors.  In the 17 th century black was the color of formal garm