Four Early Ramaley/Remaley Researchers

Over the past half-century there have been several people who have reseached Ramaley ancestors. I thought it would be interesting to others to know a bit about these folks.

William Oliver Remaley (1896-1975) was born in Slatedale, PA and grew up there. He was wounded during the battle of Argonne Forrest in WW1 and spent several months recovering in a French hospital. Sometime after the war his father, Oliver William Remaley, was transferred to Detroit by his employer, Bethlehem Steel Company, because Bethlehem had a long-term contract with General Motors. The home that WmO and his wife later built in Livonia was taken by the state to provide for Interstate 96 in the mid 1960s and so William and his wife Mabel (1897-1988) moved to Ocala, Florida. William had owned a business forms company prior to his retirement.

According to his nephew Gene, WmO, spent a great amount of time, both before and after retirement in genealogical research. He was apparently quite opinionated and argumentative. I have heard this from my uncle (David Ramaley, see below) and Elizabeth Isabel Remaley Taylor (also see below). In fact, there is a letter from Isabel in the Westmoreland County (Remaley folder) that says, in part, "...I know Mr. William O. Remaley of Livonia Michigan, and later Florida, was a pain in the neck at times but he knew of all the mistakes in the History and wanted to put it straight."

WmO carried on an extensive correspondence trying to find Remaley connections and I have run across his "reports" (as he styled them) and letters where he asked people to submit family information to him so that he could compile and correct it. One of his sincere beliefs was that the ONLY correct spelling of the name was REMALEY and in fact he "corrected" all of his notes with this spelling, thus losing some valuable information that can be drawn from the spellings that are used by various branches.

Early in 1975 he suffered a serious stroke and asked Isabel Taylor if she would gather his notes and compile them for archival in the Lehigh County Historical Society. More on that when I discuss Isabel.

I have been working through some of his notes that were sent to his nephew Gene in 1988 upoon the death of WmO's widow, Mabel. While the notes are often redundant and rambling, it is evident that WmO cared for the preservation of information about our ancestors and I have benefitted from his work.

Elizabeth Isabel Remaley (b 1908 and living tody in Pittsburgh) She was a telephone operator who was widowed after 36 years of marriage to Dale Stewart Taylor (1906-1963). She was descended from the "Springdale Remaleys", descendants of George Remaley (abt 1772 - 1841) who founded a substantial branch across the Allegheny River from Logans Ferry in Franklin Township, Westmoreland County, PA. I had the opportunity to meet Isabel a couple of times although she no longer actively follows genealogy. She had several articles and queries published in various magazines including a three-part series in the Pennsylvania Traveler, vol 10, #3 (May1974), p 53. She attended several Remaley Reunions held in Franklin Township in the 1950s although she believed that her ancestor George was not related to the Westmoreland folks. [Note: in 2001 new information came to light as a result of several researchers that very strongly suggests that George was a son of Ambrose's son John and so, in fact, the two branches are related.] Isabel wrote out a descendancy chart that was eventually put into electronic form and rearranged by her cousin Sarah Eunson "Betsy" Cooper. The chart has been maintained by Betsy and has been widely distributed to the Springdale descendants.

When I first met Isabel at her home in 1999 she was very abrupt with me until I told her that I was related to David Ramaley of Boulder, Colorado. Then she invited me into her house and she talked about some of the early years of doing research.

Isabel took on the responsibility of assembling WmO's notes in 1975 upon his death. But she found the task quite daunting because his style was hard to follow and without some sort of "baseline" (as I would call it), she spent untold hours just trying to figure out who WmO might be talking about when he rambled off on some (unidentified) cousin's line. Finally she appears to have given up hope of actually assembling the notes into something that would be useful for the Lehigh County Historical Society and she returned much of the material to WmO's nephew Gene in 1980. I discovered the material when I called Gene a couple of years ago and I have been working through it since.

David Ramaley (b 1910 and living in Boulder, Colorado) is my uncle. By profession he was a physicist and he spent most of his working life with the National Bureau of Standards. But he spent some of his free time in doing genealogy and he wrote up a series of notes that were distributed to close family members in 1980. [He has given me permission to post these notes here and I will do so over the next few days]. Uncle David is a "lurker" on the Remaley mailing list and enjoys seeing new research results.

It is primarily through his efforts that my interest in genealogy was awakened. In about 1970 my father began a yearly assemblage of notes, articles, and Christmas Greetings called the "Ramaley Rambles" that was distributed to our small family group (the families of his brothers). My uncle David would often include some genealogical notes that he had ben working on and so I was exposed to great-grandparents and more through his writings. And for many years I was in the fortunate position of being able to visit uncle David in Boulder while on business trips to a vendor who supplied the publishing company I worked for in New York with subscription fulfillment services. I was often able to arrange travel so that I could see uncle David and aunt Margaret (who, sadly, passed away this last November at age 101).

I was constantly amazed at the widespread knowledge that uncle David had and once I asked him how he "did genealogy" in the era before computers. He replied as follows:

"Now to answer your questions about old fashion genealogy.- I first became interested in relatives when my mother, my brother John and I were visiting in West Chester, Pa. with my Aunt Caroline and Uncle Herbert Worth. About a block away lived a distant cousin, Mattie Sharples. I, (a boy of 11 years) became curious why they called her cousin and Aunt Caroline proceeded to fix me up with a family chart with the aid of Uncle Pusey Heald of Wilmington, Delaware.

"My mother kept this for me but I did not pay much attention to it until many years later. So I would say that my aunt was the first geneaologist I encounered. In looking up the Ramaley line, we visited first Harry Foight and looked over some of the cemeteries in the area (Pittsburgh) . We learned about the annual Remaley Picnic and some of the folks who attended these. In this way we got in touch with Elizabeth Taylor and thru her and others such as William O. Remaley, Gaylon McAnelly, Raymond Hollenbach, Mrs. Hauser, and Mrs Guldner.

"Harry Foight was interested in getting his daughter, Dr. Jean Foight Henderson, into the DAR and himself into SAR. I did make mail inquires to cemetries, to county courthouses, etc. to obtain wills, maps, etc. I looked up census records and military records from U.S. agencies. I started first by looking over the Pennsylvania Archives when I started on the Ramaley family. These were quite helpful. Most of these records were just kept in note books. I had no card files!"

Whenever I visited I always brought along the latest find that I had made and I well remember the time when I had just discovered Evelyn Guldner (see below) and almost breathelessly told him about the wonderful resource I had just discovered and talked to by phone in Florida.

Quite calmly my uncle said, "Oh yes, Evelyn" and then went to his back room (where the genealogical file folders were stored) and brought out a whole manila envelope of correspondence with Evelyn that went back over twenty years!

Evelyn Martz (1919-2000) married Walter George Guldner (1918-1985). Her nearest ancestor with the Remaly surname is a great-grandmother, Belinda Remaly (1836-1912) but she became interested and knowledgeable in that line. She was descended from Ambrose's son Michael and although she was born in NYC, she grew up in New Jersey and in a telephone interview I had with her in 1998, she told me of how she and her mother would head out to various county court houses and spend the entire day going through dusty books. In those days it was apparently easier to gain the confidence of the county clerks and Evelyn told me that sometimes the clerks would just show them the records and let them peruse until closing time.

Evelyn wrote "Genealogical Records of One branch of the Remely-Remaly Family in America DAR library, Washington, DC" but the notes were never widely distributed. Her concentration was on the eastern ancestors and their descendants.

All of these researchers were familiar with each other and relied on each other for support and for critical help. I write this short tribute to them all and I know that current researchers will understand and appreciate what the past generation has done in trying to preserve interest in the family history.