Anah (Babcock) Yates

This is something that I have wanted to do for years. “Pioneers of Mendon” was a series of newspapers columns that was published in the Honeoye Falls Times from Sept. 30, 1920 to May 25, 1922. It was written by Anah (Babcock) Yates who was active in the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She was also a founder of the Rochester Historical Society. She was a genealogist for the New York Genealogy Society and also a member of many other historic societies. Mrs. Yates died in 1932. I have been using her works for over 40 years.

These newspaper columns were cut out of the newspaper and pasted in scrapbooks. There are two of the scrapbooks at the NY State Library. They are completely different. One is 230 pages and the other is only 77 pages. These were digitized by Ancestry.com and are available there. Then there was another scrapbook with the columns at the Rochester Public Library with 204 pages. Just last year that one was filmed by FamilySearch. FamilySearch already had a much abbreviated version with just 66 pages. None of the scrapbooks were complete.

NY State  Historic Newspapers has digital copies of the Honeye Falls Times. Looking at that that collection there are a couple of pages missing the columns.

What I did was to combine all of the various scrapbooks into one complete set. It is mostly from the larger scrapbook at the State Library but some of those articles were faded and had to be replaced with ones from other sources. The end work has some handwritten corrections by Mrs. Yates. She had a very distinct handwriting style.

These columns include many family genealogies. Although the articles are mostly about the Town of Mendon, there are also some records of both East and West Bloomfield.