ABOUT AD WHITE

 ALVIN DINSMORE WHITE

     On July 4, 1994, A.D. White died at the age of 99 years. Mr. White was well known in southwestern Washington County as a school superintendent, lecturer, and author, but primarily as an avid genealogist and historian. His most outstanding quality was his infallible memory.

     As a young man, he interviewed elderly residents to learn the tales of early pioneers that had been passed down by word of mouth through the generations. When he became a school superintendent in the 20s and 30s, he visited the homes of all the students under his jurisdiction to inquire about their forebears. Most of these students came from immigrant parents who could not speak English. Mr. White affectionately named them "The Second Wave Pioneers" and began keeping records in his mind of the stories they told of the hardships and tragedies they endured in their efforts to give their children access to the American Dream.

     As time progressed, he kept a constant watch over the activities of his former students and stored in his memory such facts as whom they married, who their children were, where they lived and where they died and much genealogical data about them. When he retired, he wrote down these things he had stored for years in the data banks of his memory, organized them in files, and added to them over the 35 years of his retirement life.

     Because Mr. White respected his students as human beings, regardless of the poverty and hardships under which most of them lived, he became a one-of-a-kind mentor to them and the mutual respect they held for one another developed into lifelong bonds of friendship. Thus it came to pass that he was contacted over the years by hundreds of persons seeking data on their families.

     He kept every piece of correspondence from them plus a copy of his responses to their queries. He insisted they supply him with the data on their families which they, themselves, had unearthed, and in exchange, he wrote them lengthy letters of things he remembered about their families, nearly always adding his version of their family tree for as far back as he knew it.

     It was his wish that this information be made available to the public and be placed in some local setting, preferably in Avella, which was the area from out of his past for which he held the greatest fondness.

     For a period of two years prior to Mr. White's death, Kathryn Slasor and June and Max Grossman visited him on a weekly basis, reviewing with him his life's work. Max copied over 130,000 pages of his collection including not only these family files just discussed, but his old obituary treasures, thousands of clippings, cemetery inscriptions, and many other collectibles. The A.D. White Research Society, Ltd., was formed for the preservation of this material and as a means of fulfilling his wish that it be made available to the public.