As my father's line moved out of Connecticut, following the Revolutionary War, they remained for a generation in Columbia County, New York. It was there that my great-grandfather, Barclay, was born in 1819. According to Clayton's The History of Onondaga County, 1878, (page 423) his father, my great-great-grandfather, Leverett Lyman, settled in the hamlet of Lysander in 1823.
Jerusha, the wife of Leverett Lyman, and an infant grandson are buried in the Old Presbyterian Cemetery. Although the records do not show it, I have little doubt that Leverett Lyman is buried there also.
There in Lysander my great-grandfather grew up. A tailor by trade, he became the postmaster in 1853. In the map on page 19 of Sweet's 1874 Atlas his property is shown on South Street near the main intersection, and in 1878 in Clayton's History of Onondaga County he is listed as a partner with Meklin Britton in a hardware and tinware store.
The records of the Dutch Reformed Church and of the Second Presbyterian Church of Lysander show some of Barclay's daughters as members. (These records are now in the archives of the Bird Library at Syracuse University.)
My grandfather, Verner, was born in Lysander, in 1867, the youngest of ten children. In 1877, the family moved to O'Brien County, Iowa. There my grandfather grew to maturity and married, and there my father's older brother and my father were born in 1892 and 1896, respectively.
Circa 1900 my grandfather returned with his wife and two sons to Lysander, and my father grew up there, leaving to join the U.S. Army in 1915 or 1916. Around 1920 my grandfather left Lysander, lived briefly in Weedsport, and eventually moved to Skaneateles. Upon leaving the U.S. Army in 1923, it was to his father's house in Skaneateles that my father brought his young wife and infant son. My parents thereafter made their home in Skaneateles. I was born there, and so Skaneateles became my home town.
Although residing in Skaneateles, throughout the remainder of his life my father retained his friendships with several of his boyhood friends from Lysander. One whom we visited often when I was a child was a man named Harry Beebe.
Family connections with Lysander were severed when my father died in 1976. This ended an association of one hundred fifty-three years.