Friday's Photo/ Pieter Mol and Cornelia VanOeveren

Pieter Mol and wife Cornelia VanOeveren

     This photo was given to me by my mother-in law, and is of my late husband's great grandparents who  came to America from Zeeland in the Netherlands.  They and their five youngest children boarded the ship Obdam in Rotterdam, sailed to Boulogne, France, then down the English Channel into the Atlantic, arriving in New York on May 25, 1893. The manifest says they were headed for Falmouth, but somehow they ended up in Williamson, New York where Pieter purchased a farm.  He passed away there in 1905 at the age of 72.  Cornelia outlived her husband by ten years dying in 1915.  Both are buried in Ridge Chapel Cemetery in Williamson.

   The photo at right was taken around 1910 and shows the widow Cornelia seated in front of her daughter Maria Izabella, who was herself  a widow by then. The boys are Maria's children, Harold Smith on the left and on the right Edwin Smith, my husband's grandfather.  The name "Moll" still appears in the phone book for Williamson and the surrounding areas, no doubt some or all of them are descendants of Pieter and Cornelia.