BETTER THAN HEARSAY by Michael Ryan - 9 June 2026 - The Historian

WINDHAM - She is where she has always been, inseparably a part of the past, present and future, wording it in a way Patti Morrow would smile about, wanting you to join in the mirthful mysteriousness of it.

Morrow passed away on June 3, serving as Windham town historian for the past forty years, dealing with health issues over the last months.

Patti didn’t dwell on it and neither will we, a sage decision if you have ever seen the school marm, ruler-strict side of her, correcting you on some historical fact that, to you, was minuscule. It sure wasn’t to her.

Once order was restored, she could be softer than summer wind sweeping through C.D. Lane Park, a mile or so down the road from the house she grew up in and still called home, in the hamlet of Maplecrest.

The picnic pavilion at the park is named in honor of her father, Valentine Morrow, who, in the heyday of Maplecrest, was the general store owner and postmaster, following in his father’s community-devoted footsteps.

In one form or another, Morrows have been ingrained in these mountains and traceable in the roots of many family trees since the early 1800’s. 

Patti said she got her mule-headedness about all things historical, and in particular genealogical, from her dad, sparking a spirited family spat.

“Stubborn. That’s the word he’d use,” Patti said in a local radio talk a few years back, laughing. “He used to say I was as stubborn as my mother. Mom would say to me, ’you get that stubborn streak from your father.’”

Wherever it came from, The Historian, as Patti will forever be respectfully known, was endlessly grateful to her mom and dad for introducing her to what became the deepest following of her heart.

“When I was four years old, my parents took me to colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, and I just fell in love with the whole area,” she said on the radio.

“I think, at that age, my main interest was you could be an adult and still play dress-up. Then, my social studies teacher at (Windham-Ashland-Jewett) school, Sheldon Peck, really instilled that love of local history.

“I remember the stories he used to tell. He made history come alive,” Morrow said, developing her own knack for doing exactly the same.

She was asked, on the radio, why she had unabashedly and without affection called New York State the “Black Hole of Genealogy.”

“Because it’s true,” Morrow said, flashing a meticulously mischievous grin. “If you look at records in New England, the towns there started keeping track of births, marriages and deaths in the 1600’s.

“And when those New England families moved into New York, this State didn’t start keeping track of vital records until after 1880, so there is one  hundred years and more of no records.

“People from other States who have traced their families across the nation to get back to New York suddenly find out, ’What do you mean you don’t have my great, great, great grandfather’s birth certificate from 1820?’

“The records just don’t exist,” Morrow said, and when asked if that made her the Super Nova of Genealogy, she pondered the question for a few moments and shyly answered, “yeah, I guess so.”

It wasn’t bragging or empty egoism. It was plain fact, and in her forty years as The Historian, that has been as unchanging as warm summer winds.

As a child, Morrow would hide in the shadows of the general store aisles, listening to her father and other men swap stories about the war and its brutalities, subjects they shared only with fellow veterans.

“They’d talk when no one else was around, or so they thought,” Patti said, learning the sanctity of memories and preciousness of preserving them.

The Historian could be as reclusive as a fawn, often joking about her normal workday of intricate genealogical computer searches.

“I am very comfortable in my own 9 to 5 world,” Morrow said, meaning the silenter hours of nine o’clock at night ’til five in the morning. 

Patti could spin a tale with the best of them, such as her great grandfather being drinking buddies with bootlegger Legs Diamond, and was never in synch with certain hoity-toity approaches to archiving.

“State historians say I shouldn’t spend so much time doing genealogy, but if you don’t know anything about the people who made local history, how can you expect to understand the history they were making?” she said.

Somewhere in the long ago, the lines between breathing and not became indistinguishable for Morrow, making no bones about someday taking up residency in the Maplecrest cemetery, a shout away from her home.

“What will history say about The Historian?” she was asked, smiling and pausing reflectively, recalling how it all began.

“I met with Dorothy Talmadge who was town historian at the time. She was retiring. She put in a good word for me with Pat Meehan,” Morrow said, referring to the late and longtime town supervisor T. Patrick Meehan.

It was a poignant small town circle of events. “When I was a week old, I got a letter from Pat’s mom, welcoming me to the world,” Patti continued.

“When I took this job, I had no clear direction on what I was supposed to do. I figured out my own path and built on that,” including an annual historian’s report brimming with small town lore and legends.

“Hopefully, what I’ve done saves someone in the future of lot of time,” The Historian said, “finding out how all the families here are connected, and how history fits into their stories and vice versa.”

A personal collection contains countless one-of-a-kind artifacts, postcards and unique items that, “I’d like to see in one location for researchers to use.” Patti said. “That’s the ideal, but I don’t know if it will ever be.”

Getting back to the Great Beyond, “I deal with death all the time as a genealogist. I’m kind of used to all this,” The Historian said.

“Whatever happens, happens. The family has a half-plot in the Maplecrest cemetery, in the front left corner, where I can watch the world go by.

“I have to keep an eye on everything and make sure the stone wall my great grandfather built around the cemetery stays up.”