The Living Archive: Notes to My 94-Year-Old Self—F is for Found
F is for Found: A hidden "midden" from my ancestors' family farm
The digger hit something solid, and the work stopped.
It wasn’t the metallic clank of a utility line or the dull groan of a stubborn root. It was a bright, glassy clink—the unmistakable note of something made to hold a liquid, ringing out over the diesel growl. My husband, supervising the excavation for our new pool, was the first to notice the gleam of glass in the brownish-yellow Nassau County clay.
The earth is a living archive, a dense and messy ledger where every generation leaves a carbon footprint, whether they intend to or not. As the excavators began digging, they weren’t just moving dirt; they were peeling back the layers of that ledger.
Exposed pool excavation trench showing the stratigraphic layers — dark topsoil grading into brownish-yellow clay and glacial gravel.
The dirt in our yard is a classic example of glacial outwash from the Hempstead-Riverhead soil association. About 22,000 years ago, massive torrents of meltwater washed this stratified drift south from the terminal moraine, depositing layers of sandy loam and gravelly minerals. Over millennia, these sediments oxidized—essentially “rusting” into the vibrant reddish-orange and brownish-yellow hues I see in my yard today.
Digging here is a journey through deep time; among the piles, we’ve even found glints of mica and pyrite—“fool’s gold” that sparkles against the dark earth, mocking expectations for a fleeting second before you recognize what you’re actually holding.
Excavated earth pile showing pyrite/mica catching the sunlight
Although we didn’t find a buried chest of Spanish doubloons, we found treasure of a different kind.
My oldest son reached into the fresh pile of earth. First came an aqua-colored, hand-blown lager bottle embossed with OBERMEYER & LIEBMANN / NEW YORK CITY. A few feet away, a Chas. H. Fletcher’s Castoria flask. Then, a twisted, rusted cooking pot with a broken-out bottom. And finally, a cobalt blue glass bottle from the Emerson Drug Co.
Found objects, undisturbed since the 1890s.
They weren’t tucked neatly inside the pot like a buried time capsule; they were near each other but scattered, the layers of time and shifting earth having jostled them around over the last century.
I did not yet know, standing in that trench, that I was looking at my own family’s discards.
The Obermeyer & Liebmann bottle held up to the light, showing the embossed “OBERMEYER & LIEBMANN / NEW YORK CITY / MUST BE RETURNED.”
I turned the lager bottle in my hands later that night. I have spent years chasing the “fingerprints of grace”—the traceable marks our ancestors leave behind—through dusty ledgers, following my father’s ancestors back through hundreds of years to the original Dutch settlers of these plains.
Their names dot my family tree like faces as familiar as those of my own children: Hendrickson, Abrams, Watts, Pearsall, Mott.
While I have done extensive research on these families, most of my work has focused on the people who lived farther north of where I am today, in a neighboring town. I was so busy looking at the “then and there” that I hadn’t actually stopped to look at the “here.” I hadn’t yet looked at the specific maps of my southern corner to see exactly whose parcel of land my home had once been.
That night, I pulled up the land records for my own home, which I discovered sits directly on the former property line between the Cornell and Abrams family farms.
I was startled but delighted to realize I had found objects my family had used, and that they had been under my feet these many years.
I have been living above my ancestors’ farm’s midden all these years without knowing it.
Henry Hendrickson was the son of Albert and the grandson of Charles and Mary Hendrickson. Charles and Mary were the common ancestors of this entire patch of earth—the parents not just of my direct line, but of Mary Jane Hendrickson (who married Benjamin Abrams) and Harriet Hendrickson (who married Miller Doxey).
This was the lyrical rhythm of the plains: large families with ten or twelve children who went on to have families of their own, kin marrying kin until eventually, everyone in the village was more or less related.
The Abrams line connects directly back to my Hendricksons—the same family whose name graces the local avenues and whose churchyard headstones I have visited more times than I can count. Charles H. Abrams, whose land abutted the Cornell farm, was my 1st cousin, 5x removed. They have been right here, right under my feet, these many years. I didn’t have to travel north to find them; I just had to wait for the earth to open up.
What we have found in our yard is called a midden, a discarded history.
In the rural agrarian world of the 1890s, before municipal garbage removal, waste management was a matter of practical triage. Farmers moved their “indestructibles”—glass, iron, stoneware—as far from the freshwater well as possible.
Property borders and tree lines became natural repositories for the things that wouldn’t rot, essentially serving as a family’s private ledger of life. But every ledger eventually has a final entry.
The presence of these 1890s artifacts precisely where the Cornell and Abrams property lines met reveals a distinct “before” and “after” for this soil. When these bottles were discarded, this land was still a sprawling, rural agrarian expanse.
It wasn’t until 1913, twenty years later, that the farm was subdivided and the house I now live in was constructed. The builders essentially sealed that 19th-century family ledger beneath the foundation of a 20th-century suburban dream, preserving the 1890s layer and keeping it undisturbed by the subsequent century of lawn-mowing, gardening, and utility work.
Finding a midden that predates the house itself is a reminder that, while my home has stood for over a century, the history of the land it sits on runs much deeper than its 1913 cornerstone.
Pearsalls, Hempstead Town, Queens County, 1873. The village that would become Lynbrook fourteen years later. Note the Pearsall general store is marked at the top — the commercial center of this entire family network.
Close-up showing the Cornell farm adjacent to the Abrams and Watts tracts, land I live on now.
Undisturbed Since the 1890s: A Forensic Look
So far, every piece we’ve pulled from the dirt dates to the 1890s. There are several things that tell me this, but two things about the Castoria bottle in particular help. Its mold seams fade before reaching the lip—the defining mark of a hand-blown, pre-machine bottle, a method largely replaced by machine manufacture around 1910—and Fletcher began requiring his signature on Castoria labels and wrappers by 1892 specifically to fight imitators, placing the bottle firmly in that late-Victorian window.
These artifacts tell a story of how our people obtained the things they needed.
If Charles Abrams bought these tonics at the general store in the center of town, he was buying from other extended family—the store was owned and operated by Wright Pearsall (note his store marked at the top of the Beers map).
Wright Pearsall was a man of many hats: both the town’s merchant and its undertaker, the one who sold Charles Abrams the Bromo-Seltzer for a pounding headache and the Castoria for a child’s ailment, and also the one who was called to tend to my ancestor Henry Hendrickson’s wife, Mary, when she tragically broke her neck falling from a wagon on Christmas Day, 1890.
Wright Pearsall is listed as the undertaker on Mary Byrnes Hendrickson’s death certificate.
It is a striking juxtaposition—while one branch of the family was leaning on Pearsall for their deepest grief, their cousins, just a few farms away, were likely leaning on him for their daily tonics. The 1873 Beers map shows his store at the heart of the village, the primary coordinate for this entire social network.
The “Ordinary” of 1893 vs. 2026
In 1893, the country was deep in a massive economic depression known as the Panic of 1893. Grover Cleveland was in the White House, and farmers were consumed by debates over silver and gold. Our worlds look very different now, but the fundamental human needs remain unchanged.
Mothers in the 1890s reached for Castoria to tend to a child’s tummy ache just as I tend to mine; I am still searching for an adequate headache cure, perhaps not so different from the family member who reached for that cobalt blue Bromo-Seltzer; and we still enjoy a cold beverage on a sunny Sunday.
The Living Archive: From the Ground Up
A midden may by definition be a “discard pile,” but for me, it is vivid evidence of lives lived. So F is for Found—the bottles, yes. But also me, found within a story I’ve been researching and writing about for years, not realizing I’d been standing on top of it without knowing it.
Those lives of the people on the farms on the map enabled mine, and they enabled the lives of the children who will soon swim in the pool. When it’s finished, the water will sit directly above the midden layer we found. My children will swim, unknowing, above the very seam where their kin once discarded the remnants of their daily lives.
I find myself imagining them all together at a family picnic on the Abrams farm, drinking from that Obermeyer bottle and deciding, in the heat of a lively afternoon, not to bother with the return deposit. Touching these objects feels like finding a gift I never expected; I am holding the marrow of their ordinary lives at the exact same moment I am trying to chronicle the marrow of my own living archive.
The earth kept it, and I found it. It came from the marrow of this land.
Author’s Note: A How-To
To find the seams of your own history, stop treating your property as a modern address and start treating it as a coordinate.
In New York state, a property’s true identity is its SBL (Section, Block, and Lot)—a fixed identifier that remains unchanged through every deed transfer. Trace your SBL back to georeferenced historic atlases, such as the 1873 Beers.
If you find a midden, you aren’t finding trash; you are finding the unfiltered ledger of the people who shared your soil long before you.
While the term “SBL” is specific to New York’s municipal mapping, almost every state in the U.S. uses a version of this land ownership system. If you are researching outside of New York, here is how you find the “coordinate” for your own living archive:
1. The APN (Assessor’s Parcel Number)
Used in states like California, Arizona, and Florida, the APN is the most common equivalent to the SBL — a series of hyphenated numbers following a hierarchy of Book / Page / Parcel. This number is your key to the County Assessor’s maps. Just like the SBL, you can take an APN to a historical map collection (like the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps) to see what was on that lot in 1890 versus 1920.
2. The PLSS (Public Land Survey System)
If you are in the Midwest or the West (states like Ohio, Illinois, or Kansas), your land is part of a grid. You’ll be looking for your Township, Range, and Section. Many family farms were 160 acres — a quarter of a square-mile section. Finding your coordinates in this grid lets you look at Plat Maps, the 19th-century equivalent of the Beers Atlas. They clearly label the owner’s name over the specific square of land they farmed.
3. Metes and Bounds
In the original Thirteen Colonies and states like Texas, property was often defined by physical landmarks — “the large oak tree” or “the bend in the creek.” While these are harder to track, modern GIS (Geographic Information Systems) at the county level have usually assigned a Map/Lot number to these properties to make them searchable.
The process to use these coordinates for research is the same regardless of state:
Find your Parcel ID: Look at your most recent property tax bill or your deed.
Locate the “Parent” Tract: Use that ID on your County’s GIS Map (most counties now have these online).
Cross-Reference with History: Identify the specific landform and look it up in Historical Atlases. The Library of Congress has a massive digital collection.
When you stop looking for “123 Main Street” and start looking for “Section 14, Plot B,” the modern world falls away. You start to see the property lines as they existed before.
Sources and Further Reading
Hempstead Soil Series — USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
Riverhead Soil Series — USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
Nassau County Soil and Water Conservation District
Obermeyer & Liebmann Bot’g Dept., New York City — Bay Bottles
Obermeyer & Liebmann’s — Historic Beer Bottles NYC
Dr. S. Pitcher’s / Chas. H. Fletcher’s Castoria — Bay Bottles
Fletcher’s Castoria / Pitcher’s Castoria — Glass Bottle Marks
Bromo-Seltzer in the Cobalt Blue Bottles — Society for Historical Archaeology
Bromo-Seltzer Cobalt Blue Bottles — Glass Bottle Marks
Crisis Chronicles: Gold, Deflation, and the Panic of 1893 — Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Living Through the Panic of 1893 — FamilySearch
1873 Beers Atlas, Pearsalls Plate — David Rumsey Map Collection
Historic Maps of Nassau County — Library of Congress Geography and Map Division
Fascinating! Thanks for writing, Lauren
How interesting! It was only yesterday I was reading a piece here on Substack about someone else who had discovered they had been living close to where their ancestors had once lived without realizing it and reported several others who had similar experiences.