Clarence Fred Litts was born on 27. Dec. 1916 at Port Ontario, Oswego County, New York. He was the son of
Frederick Edward Litts and
Edna Vanderbilt. Clarence Fred Litts married
Florence Stella Cates, daughter of
George Frederick Cates and
Vesta Lucretia Smart, on 15. May. 1938 at Richland Twp., Oswego County, New York. Clarence F. Litts March 1998 -
Woodrow Wilson was President when I was born Dec. 27, 1916 in Port Ontario, NY in the house that my great-great-grandfather Daniel H. Litts built in 1830 after moving here from Kinderhook, NY in 1825. All my life I have lived in the Pulaski area, and always within ten miles of that old farm. When my father, Fred Litts, inherited the property from his uncle and namesake, the farm had more than 350 acres. Our land bordered what was then called the Oswego Turnpike (Rte. 3). The north line was about 500' south of Mud Creek in Port Ontario, west bordering property owned by the Phelps family, all the way to Lake Ontario. At that time Pine Grove was located just north of Mud Creek (Spath Dr.) When my father was two years old, his parents George Washington and Adelia J. Woodruff Litts moved west, first to Anaconda, Montana, and later in 1892 to Boise, Idaho, where she died in 1895. Her brother Edward went to Boise to pick up three of the four children and take them back to New York to be raised by relatives, each going with a different family. The eldest child, Francis Edward, stayed with his father in Idaho, I don't know what happened to him. Uncle John went to live with his mother's brother Herbert Woodruff, Uncle Bert as we called him, lived on Pine Grove Road, he and his wife Mattie ran a boat livery. Uncle Bert also had a shop and built boats for the people who ran nets on Lake Ontario. Uncle John married Ethel Cornell and settled in Camden, NY where he worked for railroad and ran the railroad station in Camden. Aunt Ella was placed with Andrew Fleming, his wife was grandma Delia's sister, later she moved to Watertown, NY to live with their daughter, William and Alley Reese, and go to school there. Ella married a baker named Ernest Kneller, everyone called him Dutch because that was his nationality. The had one son, Robert, who lives in Syracuse, NY. My father went to live with his father's brother, Fred and Eva Calkins Litts, they had no children of their own. Eva used to call them Fred 1 and
Fred 2 so they would know which one she was speaking to. When my father was a teenager he was caught in a pool hall, something Uncle Fred and Aunt Eva frowned upon, after an argument my father ran away from home, ending up in Alaska looking for gold. He came home to New York in 1908 when his uncle took sick, and inherited the farm upon Uncle Fred's death in March 1909. May 22, 1912 father married my mother, Edna Vanderbilt from Lyons, New York. Aunt Eva moved to Pulaski and lived with a relative. Within four years after grandmother Delia died, grandfather remarried a woman in Boise, Idaho, Charlotta "Lottie" Stack Howeth, they moved to California after their only daughter, Winnie was born in October 1900. It wasn't until his death certificate was located in 1997 that I learned of his death on Jan. 23, 1929 in Westwood, California. I was born on Dec. 27, as I said, but my birth certificate reads the 28th. When the doctor was filling in the information in the town records about my birth the day after I was born, he wrote in the wrong date. My first recollection of my childhood is around the age of five. I can remember the old wood stove, they were used for everything. The living area had a wood stove for heat, a round pot belly type. The kitchen stove was used for cooking, it had a water tank at the back end to heat water, for washing and anything you'd need hot water for. The front of the stove was the hottest and the heat graduated back so when cooking you moved the cooking pots forward or back, depending on how much heat you needed. In the middle of the stove was an oven, the fire box up front and the chimney on the water tank end. The heat surrounded the oven as it went to the chimney. The fire was controlled by a draft that would..................... In Mar. 1998.