My Genealogy Hound

ISRAEL RECORD. The democracy of Chautauqua county lost one of its strongest adherents when, on the 16th of July, 1887, Israel Record, of Silver Creek, closed his eyes in their last sleep and passed over into the unknown world. Israel Record descended from a line of ancestors who were thoroughly American in their character and democratic in their habits. A hundred years spent in the valleys of the Hudson were but the sequel of their earlier residence in the colonial settlements, and the sixty years of life passed in Chautauqua county completed to the present generation an unbroken citizenship in the new world of almost two centuries, during which the brain and muscle of this family were devoted to the development of the vast and unlimited resources of our country.

Israel Record was a son of Reverend John Record, who was a prominent citizen, proprietor of the village grist-mill and pastor of the Baptist church at Poughkeepsie, N. Y. In the old family Bible, the title page of which bears the date of 1766, is the quaint and curious, though laconic and succinct, entry: “Between the hours of ten and eleven o’clock, Friday, October 12, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight, then was Israel Record born in Poughkeepsie.” Israel Record passed twenty-five years of his early life in eastern New York and then married Mary Gardner, in Dutchess county. Eight years afterward (1830), with his wife and two children he followed the course of the setting sun until he reached Chautauqua county, and soon found a home in the town of Sherman. A few years later he moved to Hanover town and lived there until he died. His marriage resulted in nine children, four of whom are still living: Mrs. Emily Wood, and William Record, of Versailles, Cattaraugus county; John G., a lawyer of Forestville; and Mrs. N. Babcock, of Silver Creek, at whose home he died.

Israel Record was less than two years of age when the present century began, and kind nature seeming to realize that a man of that day must be possessed of great bodily and mental strength, endowed him with a massive physique and a mind and will commensurate. His memory was a wonderful store-house of knowledge, and it is said that within a few days after President Cleveland’s inaugural address was published he repeated it verbatim and remembered it perfectly until he died. Dates and places, laws and State constitutions, amendments and the men who advocated them were as familiar to his memory when past eighty years of age as to the eye of an ordinary man when looking at the printed page of an open book, and when he once asserted the correctness of a statement it was useless to refer to a book for corroborative proof for he was always found to be correct.

His faith in democracy was as strong as the most devout Christian’s in religion. An expression once made, referring to him, said: “Counter arguments, however good or impressive, fall as powerless as raindrops on a granite boulder.” He endured the twenty-eight years of republican rule with outspoken condemnation and contempt, and probably no man in the country more sincerely welcomed, or was made so supremely happy by the democratic victory of 1884 and the change of administration in 1885. He was tender towards his family and the affection he felt for his wife bordered on adoration. Of her he would say: “She knew something,” in a tone that indicated that to him all other women were as common clay. He died as he had lived, unflinching and unterrified, and he went into eternity “like one who wraps the drapery of his couch about him and lies down to pleasant dreams,” when he had reached the unusual age of eighty-eight years, ten months and four days.