Elwyn Benedict 2007
Interviews with Elwyn
Elwyn and Esther Benedict were interviewed in May of 2007 by Jim Benedict. Here is part of the transcript.3
Jim: So how did it all start? How did it really start?
Esther: Well we got married in 1953, but you started talking about your father [in 1952]. You said, “I wished I had asked more questions.” He finally found out that Henry Benedict that wrote Volume I sent out forms to all the Benedicts that he knew, from all around Connecticut and all over.
Elwyn: I was only 19 at the time. My father had told me a lot of stuff verbally. Once in a while I would ask him more and more. I hadn’t put it down on a piece of paper or anything, just all in my head. So one day I said I’m going to find out what’s going on here. So I knew my great-grandfather was Alexander Benedict and I knew there was one book around, so I went down to the library. She [the librarian] helped me find where Alexander was. There was about 7 or 8 of them in the book. So that wasn’t too bad. I think we got to the seventh of them before we decided we had the right one [chuckles]. We would go on vacations a lot. And as the kids got bigger and bigger…
Elwyn: Well I guess I made eight or ten different trips to the library. So I’d go up and write some stuff. Finally got a Xerox machine up there. So I would sit there and write it. So I wrote and sent stuff off, and sent off forms to all over the States and Canada and everywhere else.
Jim: How many did you send out?
Elwyn: Oh good night! it must have been, I don’t know, sometimes I sent out 30 or 40 out in a day.
Jim: ..The postage alone….
Esther: We didn’t pay any attention to the postage, did we?
Darrell: When I was little he used to work at Carrier Corporation- Air Conditioning. Every year he’d get a longer vacation, so we used to go out on trips to different states every year; we’ve been to just about every state of the Union. He used to go to every telephone book he could and copy down all Benedict names. We used to visit Benedicts in different states. He couldn’t go by a cemetery, so we got out of the car and tromped through every cemetery, trying to find a dead Benedict’s gravestone [laughter]. He wrote all that information down, all the gravestones and stuff.
Jim: Now Darrel, I’m 61; how old are you? “I’m 53.” And so this has been all of your life.
Darrell: Yeah, just about.
Esther: I took care of the two boys while he and his mother did the book. She wrote it in longhand.
Jim: Now tell me about Henry Benedict, and the first book. Do you know much information about that? That was published in 1870, I believe.
Esther: I don’t think he’s got much of a lineage in there, has he? Henry didn’t have any children.
Jim: Oh, so he had to finish the book quickly because he had no sons or daughters to turn it over to.
Esther: We’ve been to Southhold, Long Island to see the old Thomas household. It’s still standing. We stopped right in front of the house and I wanted to walk out by the creek, because you have to have water when you run a mill. The woman came out of the house and ordered me off the property. I was very hurt (chuckle).
Jim: What really inspired you to go as far as a book. I mean, what a commitment!
Elwyn: Well, there was only one book available that you could look at. I figured someone should start getting all these Benedicts together so we all know each other and what’s going on. It’s amazing how many people never even thought about it, to look up their ancestry.
Esther: She [Elwyn’s mother] died in ’64, in February. We got some information after that, and then I copied it in longhand. All those ones you said start typing, so did.
Elwin: Do you remember when my mother was still alive that I used to work on that with her every night…
Esther: Yup, until one in the morning, and then they’d have a little snack and then he’d come to bed, then he didn’t want to get up and go to work the next morning! That was in the winter. In the summer we raised vegetables and peddled vegetables over in East Syracuse. Raspberries and strawberries and sweet corn and tomatoes. We went peddling every night so we had a busy time of it. In the summer we were busy and in the winter we were busy.
Jim: Working on the book was incredibly difficult, because if you had to insert something, how did you do it? Retype?
Esther: Once I started typing, I don’t think we added anything, do you?
Elwyn: We’d buy a roll of this tape, you know… (Jim: “correcting tape?”) Yes, we’d cut it out, cut it out.
Esther: Yes, if I made a mistake I had to cut it out with a sharp; it’s like a rubber sucker.
Elwyn: If we had a mistake going, like a one-word or a two-word mistake, you keep going until you had three or four sheets all whacked out, then you’ve got to type it all over again.
Esther: Those sheets were long, they were 64 lines.