RECS Abstract

This Monday last year found RECS Abstract switching to remote operations and bracing for anything. It's been a year. While we reflect on the many losses and grief, I give thanks for every client, colleague, and business associate simply because I am so very glad that we're all still here. We made it this far, and we are all stronger than we could've known a year ago.

The most famous person from every county in NY state Who is the most well-known person from each of New York's counties? Find out.

RECS Abstract is open for business, and we plan to continue offering title search services throughout the COVID-19 crisis.

We are prepared to be flexible and creative, so that all of us may continue working safely and effectively. There will be limitations that none of us can control, but we can get through this!

We look forward to working with all of clients, and also would like to extend an offer of assistance in a spirit of collaboration to our colleagues, as we all try to make the best of this remarkably bad situation.

Karin Lanning

Seneca Falls, New York is located in Seneca County, one of the several counties making up the gorgeous Finger Lakes Region. Today, Seneca Falls is one of many small, picturesque towns in our region, facing the same economic and social challenges that plague our region. It's hard to walk through Seneca Falls today and imagine it as a hub of progressive social reform, but that's exactly what it was in the mid-1800's. In this small town in upstate New York, the women's suffrage movement officially launched with the Convention of 1848.

One of my favorite title searches involved property once owned by a number of Seneca Falls' leading families, so while working through my otherwise thoroughly mundane research project du jour, I saw the names Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Amelia Bloomer (as well as the men in their lives) interspersed among the records.

As I reveled in actually getting paid to check out such records, oozing historic and cultural significance, I dared to think these women would probably have been thrilled to look around the office of their own county's clerk and see women working as elected officials, business owners, and branch managers of large corporations. (Also, we were ALL wearing pants. Thank you, Amelia Bloomer!)

Title research is fascinating, and over the years, I have often been asked about the most interesting finds in researching properties.

Topping the list of searches that made me proclaim, "I LOVE my job!" is the Ithaca & Owego Railroad.

Our very own Ithaca (and Owego, obviously) was home to the 3rd or 4th railroad in North America, depending on which source one is consulting, and the first rural railroad.

In the late 1820's both Ithaca and Elmira sought a canal that would place one city in the middle of a trade route connecting the Susquehanna River to the Erie Canal. Elmira was chosen as the site in 1830 and granted $300,000 to make it happen.

In a bold, groundbreaking move, several Ithaca and Owego merchants and investors collaborated and quickly built the Ithaca & Owego Railroad in order to claim a stake in the Susquehanna - Erie Canal trade route. The local merchants involved have their place in local history, but their financiers included Henry Poor (the Poor of Standard & Poor).

The Ithaca & Owego railroad was organized in 1833 and tracks were laid by 1834. Railroads were such a new innovation that the initial "trains" were nothing more than really big horse drawn wagons, so the first trains galloped goods from one city to the other. By 1840, the first steam engine, nicknamed "Old Puff" chuffed down the railroad.

The following picture shows the terrifying inclined plane by which cars were towed up or lowered down south hill in Ithaca.