A Research Challenge
For many years I have been tracking down and sorting out the descendants of John3 Byington/Byintun of Branford, Connecticut.1 But locating the father of John6 Byington has proved perplexing. (See box.) My research turned up contradictory leads which I have not yet resolved, but the pursuit has been exceptionally fruitful in other ways.
The 1800 census lists John6 Byington in Southeast, New York, in then Dutchess (now Putnam) County; he later lived in Westchester County. His grandfather was almost certainly the Nathaniel4 Byington who was born at Branford, New Haven County, Connecticut, on 20 May 1706 and was the son of John3 and Jane (Westover) Byintun. Nathaniel4 was in Southeast, New York by 1746. John3 was probably the son of Caleb2 Boynton and grandson of William1 Boynton who was in Rowley, Massachusetts, before 1640. Who John6’s father was remains a question mark.
John Farnham Boynton, in his often flawed Boynton Family, complicated matters by suggesting that John6’s father was either “Solomon” or “Jonathan” [sic] citing no sources. There is no surviving record of any possible Jonathan in Dutchess County during the eighteenth century, but possibly Boynton miswrote “Jonathan” for John.
Both a Solomon5 and a John5 were found in the 1790 census in Fredericktown (close to Southeast), and both had been Revolutionary War soldiers born in Connecticut. Given their ages, they were also almost certainly sons of Nathaniel4.
I thought I knew which was John6’s father when I discovered that A. Homer8 Byington had joined the New York Sons of the Revolution based upon a descent from John5, but unfortunately, his application for membership included no evidence that he was John5’s great grandson.
Then I discovered that one of A. Homer8’s nieces, when she joined the DAR during the 1920s,had claimed descent from another John Byington who had also been in the Revolution and had lived in nearby Redding, Connecticut. John6’s father could have been either one of the two Johns, or Solomon, or even someone else. To complicate matters further, eighteenth-century vital, church, land, cemetery, and probate records, as many know, are woefully lacking in this part of Dutchess County.
In 1973, I learned that an upstate New Yorker, Robert E. Lord, had already spent ten years researching this branch of the family. We corresponded2 extensively, and while I learned much, came no closer to identifying John6’s father.
Since DNA testing didn’t exist then, I decided to find a solution to the puzzle by process of elimination. If I could unravel the relationships between all the Byingtons living between 1700 and 1850, I might be able to isolate John6’s father.
I accumulated as many descendants of John3 of Branford as I could. I then became curious about William1 Boynton’s parentage, and started collecting as many sixteenth and early seventeenth century Yorkshire Boyntons as I could find.
This effort resulted in my collecting the names of every Byington, however spelled, in every reference work and published genealogy at the NYG&B, the State Library in Hartford, and elsewhere, and, in the days before Ancestry.com, in every census through 1850. I then matched up most, but not all, of them.
In the early 2000s, I had the great good fortune to find on the internet a distant cousin, Dr. Mark Byington, a historian teaching at Harvard. Mark had independently collected most of the same Byingtons I had, plus some, and was in touch with several others, including Bob Lord and Larry Boswell, of Ottawa, working on a Canadian branch of the family. Now Mark and I are methodically attempting to document from primary sources five generations of each of the male descendants of John3’s six sons. Three sons have been researched so far and written up in draft in Register format.
And so while I have yet to document John Byington’s father, you can see that much good has come from the pursuit.
A Printing and Publishing Challenge
By 2006, the first volume of my family history, The Sum of Perishable Things, after much tweaking and proofreading, seemed ready for publication, and it was time to find a publisher. I have always valued well-made books. After all the work I had put into researching and writing my book, I did not want a cheap production and binding job done with mine, and I rejected an internet solution.
I explored various options, from the Newbury Street Press to various print and copy shops, but concluded that the cost of publishing the book was going to be too high in cost, or poor in quality. What I wanted was an attractive, well-designed real book, but not at the price I feared I would have to pay to get it.
My first challenge was preparing the manuscript for a printer. My twelve-year-old computer with an early version of Microsoft Word caused me to waste many, many hours of needless work reformatting text that “wandered” after two printers tried to print it.
Serendipitously, about this time I went on a field trip to New London, Connecticut, to track down an obscure Byington at the City Clerk’s office. A kind lady, Janice Watrous, referred me to the binder of the New London records: Eric Zimmerman at Markey & Asplund bookbinders in Foster, Rhode Island. To make a long story short, Eric taught me about book binding and how to prepare text for printing. At that point, I rewrote and reformatted the book again and extensively changed most everything including the index. But Eric contracted a serious illness, and I began a search for another solution.
In the small Dutchess County town of Millbrook, where I spend much of the year, I found Andy Cooley and his terrific team at Central Press. He began first by upgrading the quality of my photographs and then turning my twelve Word files into one PDF file. Then, after two more rewrites, they printed the pages, and Eric returned to the scene to bind the books.
I think the result is a good-looking book. As to its contents, I’ll leave that to others to judge, but Volume I of The Sum of Perishable Things is beautifully printed and bound. Also, thanks to all the mistakes I made getting this first book out, the next two volumes, which are both largely written, are going to be vastly simpler and far less expensive to produce.
With hindsight, if you are computer literate, there is no reason why you should not publish a book on your own, especially if you can find a binder and printer as competent as the ones I used. If not, hire a “pro” to help you do the job right. I wish I had.
The other important lesson I learned was not to have an editor edit and proofread my text too early on in the process. I should have had the book proofread next to last just before indexing. But one unexpected benefit from having written and published a book myself was that I got to be part of that fascinating world for a brief time, if only as a visitor.
Notes
1 The name has not always been Byington. By 1973, I had found out that my name was a variant on Boynton, an East Riding, Yorkshire, England, place name, which according to Dr. George Redmonds, the eminent Yorkshire-based local historian who has lectured at the NYG&B, came from the Saxon, “Boffa’s tun” or farm.
2 We addressed each other as “Mr.” as was the custom in those long gone times. In the mid-2000s, we reconnected on the internet as “Bob” and “Homer.”
NYG&B member Homer Byington, an amateur but unusually sophisticated family historian, is working on a multivolume family history. The first part of this article reports on a particularly challenging research problem with a Byington line; the second part describes his efforts to publish his family history, The Sum of Perishable Things (Volume I). This book is reviewed on page 66. Mr. Byington, a retired banker, lives in New York City and Millbrook, NY. A related article by Mr. Byington appeared in the Summer/Fall 2010 issue (vol. 21, p. 38-39) of The New York Researcher.