What's All This Then?

I grew up in Rush, NY and then left after High School. So many of my friends did the same thing. We went to college and made new friends, learned new skills and formed careers and relationships far away. If I look through my senior high school yearbook, there are maybe 15 out of 50 people who stayed in the Rush area.

My parents came to visit when we settled in the New York City area. Our kids grew up in the 2000's and they did the same thing I did. Went to college and made new friends, learned new skills and formed careers and relationships far away. Our children would probably say the same thing about their senior high school yearbooks.

What is different is that our attachment to where we live now is transactional. We get work from here. There are cultural activities near by. The services we pay for with taxes are good. The community is fine, but I don't feel a connection to the place like I do to my far away hometown of Rush, NY. There are a few reasons.

Probably most important is that the people in my family were big into "saving history". This eventually morphed into my parents becoming "hoarders", which made my connection to Rush distant. It's hard to visit hoarder parents when you can't find a bed in the junk.

There's a bed in there somewhere.

The cool part about hoarders is that they save everything good. You just need to do lots of sifting to find the good stuff when hoarding mixes in good stuff with trash. When my parents passed away, I got the chance to sift. The good stuff that I found really told the history of my family and the Town of Rush. I spent five years doing this sorting, and it made me ask lots of questions that I am still working on answers for.

Daguerreotypes of my Great Great Grandfather Thomas Ward and his family from around 1865. Found in an underwear drawer.

Some answers are personal, but some may also be answers you seek if you are a Rush "expatriate" or if you just moved to town and you have questions. I can't be an expert because I don't live in Rush anymore. What I can be is a "historical guide" and offer an opinion on things from an analytical perspective.

It's just an opinion. Please don't be offended. I may be totally wrong.

But if I am looking at raw data, I'm going to try to analyze it accurately. If you don't like what I see, I apologize in advance.