Slate museum quarries families
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By Gordon Dritschilo Herald Staff - Published: March 8, 2006
GRANVILLE, N.Y. — The Slate Valley Museum may soon be reuniting some of the families it honors.
The museum has entered into a partnership with the National Museums Wales that includes a genealogy project that could help descendents of Welsh immigrants to the Slate Belt track down their distant cousins in Wales and vice versa.
"It really has evolved over several years of our working with the Welsh Slate Museum, which is one of the museums in the National Museums Wales," Slate Valley Museum director Mary Lou Willits said last week. "We visited that museum in 2004 when we took our study tour of the slate region of Wales."
Willits described the connection between the two museums as both geological and human.
"The Slate Belt runs from Wales to Newfoundland to Vermont to New York to Pennsylvania," she said. "That's one continuous vein."
Not long after slate was discovered in western Vermont and eastern New York state during the 1830s, Welsh slate experts were brought in to help build the industry.
"The Welsh had been quarrying slate and making slate roofing for centuries," Willits said.
Significant immigration from Wales continued until the 1920s, with the scores of workers working in quarries now owned by descendents of the original immigrants.
Willits said the partnership between museums is beginning with mutual public relations efforts, each museum supporting the other.
"As that evolves, we may move toward more territorial efforts, like exhibits or programs that travel back and forth," she said.
In the meantime, Willits said the museum is gathering remembrances of various Welsh families in the area while her counterparts in Wales undertake a similar effort.
"They're in touch with families in Wales who have people who left to come to America," she said. "We have people here with Welsh ancestry who are interested in their genealogy. Between us, we will create a joint database. Right now, we've asking people to come with memories and family histories."
Willits said she hopes to have enough information to make the genealogy project one of the presentations when the museum plans a joint program with its Welsh partner in June.
Contact Gordon Dritschilo at gordon.dritschilo@rutlandherald.com.
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