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So I know about things like that. I know all about the ships in Maine. I know about the French and Indian War. I know about the French claims. I know how the French destroyed our ships. I know how my Uncle Moses White saw “seventy sailor ship lie rotting at his wharf.” He was my grandmother's uncle. My grandmother knew all about it because he told her. My grandmother had this perfect memory of everything she'd ever heard, and so did her mother have. They both lived to be over a hundred and so their combined memories were a considerable distance back. My grandmother's mother, Thankful, of course remembered long before the beginning of the War of the Revolution. She was intimately acquainted with life before that. She lived to be 104 and told all about everything she knew to her grandsons. She lived in the house with my grandmother. My grandmother lived to be 101. She remembered all that her mother had remembered and some more besides. You've no idea how alive that period seems to me.

Franklin Roosevelt had that same quality of memory about the affairs of the Hudson Valley and other parts of New York. Stories had obviously been told to him by people who had been there, not always his relatives, but old inhabitants who simply told him as a boy what they heard from their father and grandfather. It's the same way with me