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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The Long Line: A Stratton Chronicle — Chapter Seven
Erie Canal, near Pittsford — October 11, 1836
The rain had been falling since before dawn.
Joel Stratton walked the towpath with the reins loose in his fist, watching the mules. Three of them, dull gray in the downpour, moving at a trot that required him to move at a trot. Ahead, the canal disappeared into fog. Behind, somewhere in the mist, was the seventy-foot packet boat he had been hired to pull.
He had expected to be at Harvard.
The plan had been Seward’s — a family friend, a senator then, a man who moved other men’s children through the world’s doors as naturally as he moved himself. The acceptance had come the spring after his father’s death. Joel had farmed the family’s 160 acres in Trenton for fifteen months afterward, waiting for a buyer, watching the letter age on the mantelpiece. By the time the land sold, Seward had lost his Senate seat. The door was shut.
So instead of law books, this: reins and mud and a towpath he had come to know by instinct, the landmarks of the canal registering in his feet before they reached his eyes. The great embankment at Irondequoit was ahead. The canal rode atop earthen ramparts seventy feet high, crossing the Irondequoit Valley like a man-made cliff. His father had helped build it, hauling dirt by wheelbarrow and bucket from 1817 through 1824. Every farmer within 150 miles. The biggest earthwork in the young country’s history. And underneath it, a masonry culvert letting the creek pass through.
The trouble was seepage. For three months Joel had watched water creeping from the foot of the northern embankment. He had said nothing, because he had no authority to say anything. He was the oldest mule driver on the canal and the least experienced — the other haw-gees were twelve to fifteen, nephews and sons of captains, boys who had grown up knowing the water’s temper.
He was watching the embankment when the whippletrees shuddered.
The team slowed. The reins went taut.
Joel shouted toward the boat. Nothing. He shouted again, knowing anyone with sense was inside and dry. He could feel it in the tow line — the boat’s resistance was wrong. Not drag-wrong. Float-wrong.
He wrapped the reins around the line and ran to the canal edge.
The boat was listing. Barely — just enough to notice if you were looking.
“Captain.” His voice came out steady. “The boat is sinking.”
Poles hit the water. Depths were called. Five and a half feet, then five, the canal’s floor rising as water poured silently away somewhere beneath the great embankment.
“Get us to the locks, Mr. Stratton.”
“I judge two or three minutes, sir.”
He grabbed the reins and shouted the mules forward. They strained. The packet moved. The first step-lock appeared ahead through the rain — and then a darker shape inside it, another boat already waiting.
He stopped. He loosened the tow line. He watched the canal water drain away and the boat settle gently onto the mud.
The washout at Pittsford emptied five miles of the Erie Canal. More than one packet boat ended that night high and dry.
Joel stood on the towpath in the rain with the reins in his hand and thought: My first potential disaster on the canal, and I helped avert it.
He had work to do.
Rochester, Monroe County, New York — January to October 1837
He came to Rochester in the autumn of ’36 and nearly didn’t survive his first winter.
The swamp fever caught him in December. Dr. Alexander Kelsey — First Ward alderman, physician, a man who seemed to know everyone in the city and to have opinions on all of them — came to the Rochester House and prescribed sweet wine and quinine twice daily for two weeks. Joel lay on the fourth floor and listened to the city below him. Twenty-one flour mills running. The banks teetering under Jackson’s monetary policies. The national bank failed; cotton prices fell; bankruptcies spreading westward like weather.
Rochester fared better than most because wheat prices held steady. When Joel recovered, he took a job at a mill — two dollars for a ten-hour day, fifteen dollars for a sixty-hour week. He lived on fifty cents a day plus meals. He spent his Sundays at the Rochester Athenaeum, working through whatever was available: Paine, Jefferson, the mechanics of law. He was building something in his mind without knowing yet what it was.
By spring he was a Volunteer Watchman: a pistol, a skinning knife worn smooth with use, and a copy of Common Sense in his coat pocket. He walked the wards at night. He learned the city’s rhythms — where the trouble gathered, which corners stayed quiet, which men bore watching. He was good at it in a way he hadn’t expected. A natural talent for holding still and paying attention, for being present in a room without occupying it.
That summer the Canadian rebels came through.
Word traveled ahead of William Lyon Mackenzie’s men — Upper Canada, armed insurrection, Louis-Joseph Papineau’s Patriotes in Lower Canada. American citizens were drifting toward the border to help. Men came to Joel for instruction in marksmanship, in the maintenance of rifles and pistols. They knew his reputation. The money they offered was real.
He came close to accepting. Closer than he would ever admit.
Then the U.S. Army passed through Rochester in pursuit of Mackenzie himself, and the reality of it sharpened. He declined the next request. The intrigue faded from his daily life as autumn came on, and he let it go without regret.
He had other ambitions. He simply hadn’t named them yet.
Rochester — October 1837 to July 1838
Kelsey gave him the appointment as if it were obvious.
First Ward Constable. Rochester had grown past fifteen thousand people, kerosene streetlights on the main streets, a new city charter, and exactly five constables to keep order in all of it. Joel was named to the First Ward on Dr. Kelsey’s recommendation.
Three weeks in, a pistol shot split the evening quiet.
He broke into a trot down Hugh Street toward the sound. The dew-soaked lawn of St. Paul Church. An oak tree. Something at the base of it that was not a shadow.
He approached it carefully. The unnatural angle of a limb. A glisten where blood had pooled. He crouched and examined the wound. Then Judge Humphrey arrived with three men, and Joel had blood on his hands, and the judge’s brow was furrowed.
“What happened here?”
“Constable Stratton, sir. It’s Bill Lyman. Robbed and murdered.”
The hat turned out to have money hidden in its lining — a good deal of it. The killer had missed his prize in the dark. Joel moved around the church and found women in the alley, dressmakers, and they had seen three men: one with a French accent, one with a scar on his cheek, one with hooded eyes and a nervous twitch. They had watched a man named Barron fan bills from a wagon wallet and call for brandy.
He watched the depot for two days. On the third morning, three men slipped from behind the U.S. Hotel and moved toward the cars. The big one spotted Joel and challenged him in French. Joel planted his feet, kept his voice level, and held the scene together until a mill foreman stepped up beside him and the crowd backed off.
The trial of Octavius Barron in early 1838 was the talk of every tavern and church in Rochester. It came down to a scar — the dressmaker had seen the light catch his cheek and she would not be moved from it. Bennett and Fluett confessed in exchange for leniency and confirmed the plot.
On July 25, 1838, Barron was hanged before a crowd the city would talk about for a generation. Sheriff Perrin gave him his last words. He had nothing to say to any of them.
Joel walked the streets that night and thought about what justice costs the man who carries it.
Gates and Rochester — October 1838 to April 1840
He met her at the Athenaeum on a Thursday evening in October.
She was shelving books with careful hands, adjusting each spine as if tending to something that mattered. She wore a loose cotton blouse and moved with purpose, and when she looked up her expression was bright but brisk — a woman who had learned to be efficient with strangers.
He asked for The Sporting Magazine and Brother Jonathan and the works of Byron. She told him the limit was two books per day. He negotiated a compromise. She retrieved the magazines from behind the shelf and handed them over.
“May I have your subscriber card?”
“My name is F. J. Stratton. Subscriber number one-one-zero-five.”
She considered. “I shall accept your word.”
He found out the next day that she lived alone in the Hawks family house in Gates — her mother had died when Asenath was a child, her father seven years ago, and the neighbor farmed the land in exchange for harvest shares. She was twenty-seven years old and had built a self-sufficient life out of loss without apparent resentment about it.
He visited. She let him in. They talked until dusk, sharing books and bread and the kind of laughter that comes when two people discover they have been thinking about the same things in different rooms. She poured milk and stirred honey into his cup and asked him what he wished for, and he said someone to argue with and admire. She said she found him bold, but less than she had expected. He asked when he could call again. She said one visit at a time.
He married her on February 21, 1839, in the Hawks’ house in Gates. Justice Patrick G. Buchan officiated. Asenath was expecting their child. The ceremony was simple and exact, which suited them both.
The child came on a pale November dawn the following year. The labor went wrong quickly — transverse presentation, a placental tear, no progress. Midwife Chadwick sent for Kelsey. Kelsey brought Dr. Edward Mott Moore, a surgeon from Philadelphia, with a leather satchel heavy with gleaming steel. They worked in low voices while Asenath struggled.
Moore said: There is only one choice — the Caesarean. This is perilous. It may cost your life. But it is the only way to save your child.
Joel knelt beside her, their foreheads together. She said: Save her, Joel.
Julia Marie came into the world by Dr. Moore’s hands, mewling and thin as hope. Asenath survived the surgery. She was given opium and told not to move.
She would not see another spring. The infection came on slowly, as it did after such operations, and claimed her in April of 1840. She was twenty-eight years old.
Joel wrote her obituary with hands that shook.
“Died, in Gates on the 26th inst. Mrs. Asenath M. Stratton, aged 28 years, wife of Mr. Francis J. Stratton. By this death a fond husband is bereaved of a lovely companion, and his only child but six months of age of a kind and watchful mother. Her sickness was short. Death came but was disarmed of its terrors. Neither will the grave achieve a victory.”
He kept the words spare because spare was all he had. The fullness of it — what it meant that she had lived that way, quietly and thoroughly, and died asking only that the child be saved — that he held close and did not put into print.
Julia was six months old. She had her mother’s careful hands.
Rochester and Gates — October 1840 to October 1843
Five months after Asenath’s death, Joel began calling on Mercy Ann Warner.
She was twenty-one. She was Asenath’s half-niece — the daughter of Naomi Hawks, Asenath’s older sister by nineteen years. The family connection was awkward and the city noticed it. Joel noticed the city noticing and didn’t particularly care.
Mercy was working in the circuit court, transcribing proceedings in a shorthand style she had developed herself while apprenticed to a lawyer in Batavia. She was quick and opinionated and moved through reform circles — temperance, education, women’s suffrage — with the same efficient purpose Asenath had brought to her shelving. They were different women. Joel understood that. He married her on April 8, 1841, by Reverend Beecher in Batavia, and took that understanding forward as a working fact rather than a warning.
They were well-matched in some ways and fatally misaligned in others. Both had ambitions that required the world’s cooperation. Mercy needed a partner who would be present. Joel kept choosing to be elsewhere.
On April 25, 1843, Senator Seward’s influence finally produced the appointment Joel had been working toward for years: Deputy U.S. Marshal for the Northern District of New York. It came with a gift — Jumanah, an Arabian mare, sent from Seward’s stables. Few men in Rochester had ever seen an Arabian horse, let alone kept one. The city whispered about it. Joel accepted both the gift and the commission without apology and moved the family to Morton House.
Mercy watched the change with clear eyes. The pride was real. So was the calculation she was making.
By winter 1843, Lucius was on the way and the distance between them had grown from inches to feet. She thrived. Her evenings filled with meetings, pamphlets, invited addresses. She raised money for the school. The marriage became a dispatch exchange — news, not warmth. The quiet arguments were worse than the loud ones because they carried no possibility of resolution.
The world grows noisier, Joel, and I worry we hear each other less.
He understood what she was telling him. He understood, too, that he did not know how to change it.
There were other things requiring his attention. There always were.
Rochester and New York City — December 1843 to January 1844
The headline arrived from the New York City Courier like a gift wrapped in trouble.
December 18, 1843: $3,000 REWARD. For recovery of a black leather trunk, iron-bound, marked “Pomeroy & Co.”, stolen off the steamboat Utica, containing drafts, banknotes, and securities.
Four thousand dollars recoverable. The largest express robbery the country had known.
Gilbert Moore came to his table in the Morton House parlor on a cold evening with information already shaped into a lead — a woman named Mrs. Leggett, a marshal named Clark Robinson, fifty dollars changing hands somewhere in the arrangement. Moore was a gambler and ex-forger, a man whose knowledge was as crooked as the alleys he knew. Joel had used him before.
He wrote the first notes with the Mordan pencil Seward had given him — silver, shaped like a rifle, a birthday gift from a man who believed in memorable objects. He followed Moore’s thread for two weeks. The thread led to Philo Rust, a dignified hotel proprietor from Syracuse whose connection to the trunk turned out to be nothing but rumor and Robinson’s ambition.
Joel obtained the warrant. Justice Buchan signed it. Rust was arrested on January 2nd.
The hearing on January 13th was the worst room Joel had ever sat in.
Rust’s attorney fixed him with the cold precision of a man who had done his homework.
Were you the arresting officer of Mr. Philo N. Rust? Was the basis of this warrant a banknote from the Union Bank of New York, allegedly given to Mrs. Leggett by Mr. Rust?
I was told those notes were in the possession of Mrs. Leggett.
Who told you?
Gilbert Moore.
The warrant said Joel had seen such a note. Joel had not seen any banknote. The warrant bore his sworn name and Buchan’s hand and Robinson’s concurrence, and none of it matched what Joel knew to be true, which was Gilbert Moore’s word alone and nothing else.
Can you explain why the arrest warrant states that you had seen one of these notes while you here testify that you had not?
I cannot.
The attorney let the silence work.
Is it still your opinion that there is evidence linking Mr. Rust to the Pomeroy Robbery?
No.
He stepped down with every eye in the room on his back. The damage was done. The attorney had said so and meant it.
Three days later, a bank teller spotted a $500 bill matching the stolen descriptions. The search led to the cellar of a German immigrant named Lackner. Police found the trunk buried in the dirt, its contents mostly intact. Lackner took his own life in the Tombs before morning.
The press issued apologies. Marshal Robinson was removed from his post. Rust’s name was gradually cleared. The affair faded from daily talk and settled into legend — a lesson in ambition, misunderstanding, and the difference between the truth and a warrant.
Joel sat at his window with the Mordan pencil and thought: Seldom is the truth whole. Seldom does a lie stand alone.
Batavia, Rochester, the St. Lawrence — July 1844 to March 1845
Nathaniel Adams spread three crisp five-dollar bills on his desk by lamplight and watched Joel examine them.
“They look right,” Joel said.
“They are fakes. The best I have ever seen.” Adams ran his finger along the scrollwork. Too tight. Almost too perfect. “The president of the Bank of Rochester went pale.”
He showed Joel the tells: the engraved numeral a hair off-center; the serial numbers repeating in a short sequence that only became visible when two bills appeared side by side. The plates were cut by a master hand. Twenty-six notes had come through Adams’ till already, with more moving through the region’s commerce every week.
The merchants raised $600. Joel accepted the arrangement. It would not be a short hunt.
It wasn’t.
The trail led to the Martha Ogden on the St. Lawrence, to a tavern in Brockville, to a man named Stephen Wing whose poise was too certain for a man whose stated trade was flour and dry goods. Joel worked with Jeanette — an artist, sharp-eyed and steady, whose pencil portraits of criminal faces were more reliable than daguerreotypes. Together they mapped the network. Counterfeit notes moving south in shipments disguised as newspapers. Distribution through complicit clerks along the border. The engraving plates cut by Lyman Parks, a printer, and his daughter Julia, whose hand was better than her father’s.
The Brockville constable made clear that Joel had no jurisdiction on the Canadian side. The warning was not subtle. Joel retreated across the border and worked from what he could see.
By March of 1845 he knew the principals: Wing, Parks, Julia Parks. He knew the routes. He knew the scale — a $604,000 operation in forged bonds and hundred-dollar bills, the greatest counterfeiting enterprise the country had ever produced.
What he needed was time and place and an element of surprise.
Oswego, New York — May 16, 1845
Predawn fog.
Joel moved along the slick cobblestones near the Bull Tavern with his boots muffled and his eyes ahead. He had been in harder rooms than this. He had worked harder cases. Two years of watching Wing move through Brockville and Rochester with the casual authority of a man who believed himself beyond reach — and now this: a pre-dawn approach, Jeanette positioned inside, Wing and Parks finishing their breakfast at a corner table.
He stepped into the lamplight.
He noted the pistols before anything else. A faint bulge beneath each coat, a detail he had not expected from men whose trade was ink and paper. He had expected lawyers’ weapons — cunning and delay. Not this. Wariness moved up his spine like water finding its level.
Jeanette murmured something about an empty coffee pot and slipped away. The signal.
Joel took a step closer.
“I want you alive, Wing.”
Wing rose. Parks rose. The chairs scraped back. Joel’s hand moved toward his belt. Wing’s fingers flexed. One of those silences that has a texture to it. A glass fell somewhere in the kitchen and shattered.
Wing drew.
The crack of the pistol was enormous in the low-ceilinged room. Joel felt the burning above his ribs — searing, specific, unmistakable — and staggered. Reflex moved his hand: his own pistol came up and fired and found Wing’s shoulder.
Parks dropped his weapon with a clatter. His hands went up. His voice came out thin and rapid. Mercy, sir — please — I never wanted any part — Wing blackmailed me, threatened my daughter — for years —
Joel stood. The pain was a burning coal pressed to his side.
He did not fall.
Within hours, Julia Parks was taken in Buffalo, confessing to forging signatures that had circulated from Boston to St. Louis. The network unwound case by case — corrupt printmen, complicit clerks, wagon drivers who had moved flour barrels with false bottoms. Fifteen valises seized in Batavia. Two hundred and four thousand dollars in forged bonds alone. The total, as the Chronicle tallied it: $604,000 in counterfeit currency and securities. The largest such operation the country had ever produced.
Stephen Wing nursed his wound in iron manacles. Lyman Parks was released on bail. Joel had done what he came to do.
He convalesced in a Rochester boarding house, Jeanette beside him.
The surgeons examined the wound and set down their instruments. The ball lay too close to the heart. The standard held: operate only where the foreign body can be extracted with very little trouble, and where delay causes more harm than the operation. This was not that case. The ball would remain where it was.
He read the Chronicle each day as it arrived. The reports were thorough, the praise considerable, the public satisfaction complete. He allowed himself something that was not quite pride — more the feeling that a piece of work was finished.
Then the fever came.
It had been building in the deep tissue since the shooting, in the wound that had closed only on the surface. The abscess formed beneath: hot, sealed, accumulating pressure with no outlet. The fever rose. The chills came. The coughing began — a deep, racking sound, wet with the mixture of pus and blood that he would come to know as the regular cadence of his body’s argument with the bullet it could not shed.
When the abscess drained on its own, the fever dropped. He would feel well for a time. He would work. Then the channel would close again, the pressure build again, and the cycle would repeat. The doctors who examined him thought it was tuberculosis. It was not tuberculosis. It was a chronic lung abscess, and it would not leave him as long as the ball remained.
He understood, in those first weeks of convalescence, what the bullet had taken from him.
A marshal with a chronic lung condition is a liability. A man who runs a fever every six weeks and coughs up blood for days at a stretch cannot be relied upon for the sustained physical work that the badge requires — the long rides, the night surveillance, the confrontations that demand a man be fully present and fully capable. The city’s new administration had already made clear it had little patience for Joel’s methods. The Pomeroy hearing had cost him more than he had let himself admit. He had stood in that courtroom and said I cannot explain to a warrant bearing his name, and the city had heard it. Robinson was gone, but Joel’s reputation had absorbed the damage along with him. The appointment that had come through Seward’s influence could just as easily be withdrawn through the indifference of men who owed Joel nothing.
He turned it over carefully, the way a man examines a wound when the initial shock has passed. The badge was already loosening from his identity before the shooting. The bullet made the separation permanent.
There was also the matter of Mercy.
She had come to the boarding house once, with Adelaide and Lucius, and sat by the window while Joel lay propped on pillows trying not to cough. The visit was correct and careful and said everything neither of them put into words. She had watched the Pomeroy affair destroy months of their domestic peace — the whispered accusations, the newspaper insinuations, the slow restoration of his name coming too late to restore what the household had already lost. A man whose reputation is publicly questioned is a different weight to carry than a man whose reputation is secure. Mercy had been carrying weight she had not agreed to carry, and she was not a woman who waited passively for circumstances to improve.
Now the bullet added a new dimension to the arithmetic. A husband who was feverish and bedridden in recurring cycles, whose health could not be predicted, who might spend weeks in a boarding house being nursed by another woman while his wife managed three children alone — that was not a partnership. That was a burden. Mercy was too honest and too self-possessed to pretend otherwise, and Joel was too clear-eyed not to see it.
The marriage was already ending before the shooting. The bullet simply removed any ambiguity about when.
He lay in the boarding house and listened to Rochester moving outside the window and thought about what remained. Kelsey had told him once, years ago, that he understood suffering in a way most men did not — and had said it as though it were a gift rather than a wound. He thought about a pauper near the almshouse with an open wound, the way the medical problem had come naturally to his hands, the way treatment had felt like something he already knew how to do.
He thought about Geneva Medical College on the banks of Seneca Lake.
The thought was not new. The foundation for it had been laid over years, in hours he had never fully accounted for.
Geneva required two full courses of lectures — each sixteen weeks — and prior proof that a candidate had read medicine under a licensed physician for at least one to two years. That was the preceptor system: no self-declared readiness, no shortcuts, no admission without a man of standing willing to put his name behind yours. The college also expected Latin. Medical texts ran to Latin — Cullen’s First Lines of the Practice of Physic, Cooper’s Surgical Dictionary, Dunglison’s Human Physiology — and a student who could not work through them had no business in the theater. Chemistry. Anatomy. Botany for the materia medica. A foundation wide enough to support eight months of lectures under men who would not slow their pace for the unprepared.
Joel had been preparing without naming it.
The Athenaeum years — the Sunday afternoons and evening hours moving through whatever the shelves offered — had not been recreation. They had been the quiet accumulation of what a man needs before he knows he needs it. He had read Paine and Jefferson, yes, but also the medical pamphlets Kelsey left him and the chemistry texts borrowed under his subscriber number and the anatomy volumes he had worked through at the table beside the window. He had watched Dr. Moore operate by lamplight in a parlor while a woman labored and then died. He had stood beside Kelsey at bedsides and in alleyways and absorbed the clinical habit of observation without being told it was called that.
And Kelsey — Kelsey had always been the preceptor. He had been it from the morning he came to the Rochester House with quinine and sweet wine and looked at the feverish young man in the fourth-floor room and decided he was worth the time. Every case they had discussed, every diagnosis Kelsey had walked him through, every patient they had seen together on the wards and in the streets — that was the reading of medicine. The letter Kelsey would write to Geneva’s admissions committee was not an endorsement. It was a record of work already done.
The Pomeroy affair had cost him his standing. The bullet had cost him his occupation. Mercy’s departure — he was honest enough to call it that, whatever formal arrangement followed — had cost him his household. The three losses together had stripped him down to what was left underneath.
What was left was a man who had spent nine years studying how bodies fail and how systems break. A man who had delivered a child and written an obituary and watched a fever take a woman he loved. A man who had been accumulating the substance of a physician while earning the badge of a lawman — two tracks running parallel in the same life, converging now at the point where the badge was no longer viable.
There was also this: the bullet itself had become, by the summer of 1845, something he was learning to live around.
The first months had been the worst. The abscess was new, the cycles unpredictable, the fever arriving without warning and laying him flat for days at a stretch. By the time he reached Geneva in the fall of 1846, sixteen months after the shooting, the pattern had established itself. The abscess flared, drained, retreated. The intervals between the acute episodes grew longer. He could predict, within a few days, when a cycle was coming on — the particular tightness in the chest, the low-grade warmth in the afternoons. He learned to plan around it. A chronic condition, managed with discipline, does not necessarily defeat a man. It instructs him.
Through the Geneva years and the Ohio decade that followed, the bullet was a companion more than a tyrant. It reminded him regularly that it was there. It cost him days and weeks he could not afford. But it did not prevent him from building a practice, raising a family, or becoming the physician he had set out to become. He carried it as a man carries an old injury — aware of it, adjusted to it, seldom entirely free of it.
The final deterioration came in Washington. The last three years — 1860 to 1863 — the cycles closed in. The intervals shortened. The drainage grew heavier and the recoveries less complete. The lung tissue had been living around an abscess for fifteen years, and the structure of it was wearing down. He could feel the difference between the chronic nuisance he had managed in Ohio and the acute enemy that was taking ground now. He could not pass the army physical in 1861. He knew what that meant. He continued working — at the patent office, among the soldiers in the wards, with every resource Secretary Seward’s friendship could arrange — because a man does not stop simply because the end is visible.
He died on April 22, 1863, in his room at 393 9th Street, Washington. The death certificate read: complications of a chronic upper respiratory disability from a gunshot wound, 1845.
Eighteen years. One bullet. A career remade, two families built, a life lived at the full measure of what a damaged body could sustain.
He had, as far as anyone could measure it, already lived four men’s lives.
The fourth one just had a shorter lease on it than the others.
For the full documentary record of the Erie Canal years, the Barron murder trial, the Pomeroy Trunk affair, the Wing counterfeiting ring, and the shooting at Oswego, see Farmer, Lawman, Doctor, Spy: The Four Faces of Francis Joel Stratton in the family histories. Genealogical note: Francis Joel Stratton (1816–1863, @I829@) is William F. Stratton’s 2nd great-grandfather. His story continues in Chapter Eight: The Resolution — Geneva Medical College, 1846–1848.
—Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
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