Bad Luck and Good Luck

Maybe you’ve heard this Rodney Dangerfield gem: If I didn’t have bad luck, I’d have no luck at all!
With a bit of a stretch, I’m going to apply it to genealogy research, too.
I was investigating a family project for which the basis of the search was a family ledger. They called it the family Bible, but I soon recognized it as the ledger for the family business. It was in German, and a couple of hundred years old, so I didn’t expect it to be the same German I studied at Skidmore. And it wasn’t!
After a few hours of translation efforts, I took it to the world expert, Charles T. Gehring, Ph.D., director of the New Netherland Project, now the heart of the New Netherland Research Center in Albany, for his opinion. The spelling was different but consistent in the use of a final “d” instead of a final “t” or “et.” If you’re not keen on languages, disregard this except to appreciate his immediate recognition of the language as a dialect, perhaps Franconian, perhaps Palatine, two dialects that have softer sounds.
As luck would have it – good luck, that is – I was working on a different client’s family, poring over the surname files at the Schenectady County Historical Society, and discovered both names on pages copied from the St. Johnsville Enterprise and News, whose editor, Lou D. McWethy, gave space to genealogy discussions. In fact, in 1933 McWethy published quite a bit about the Palatine population in the area, who arrived starting in 1708.
The information cited the Hunter Ration Lists, created by Governor Hunter to communicate the desperate plight of the Palatine people brought to the Hudson River Livingston properties to extract tar from the native pine trees. Oops! Wrong kind of trees, so no need for these hundreds of workers. What to do with them?
They were dispersed to a variety of locations, and all was not well for them. Some stayed in West Camp, in Ulster County on the Hudson River. (I wonder whether today’s residents of that community have any idea of the source of the name.) You can find resources about more Palatine communities in New York State and in Pennsylvania.
Around here, the capital district of New York State, reminders are not hard to find, as in the place name Palatine Bridge, on the north side of the Mohawk River, opposite Canajoharie. My well-thumbed copy of French’s Gazetteer mentions the Palatine district, once called Stone Arabia, as well as the hamlet of Palatine Church.
The website ProGenealogists: The Palatine Project provides reconstructed ship passenger lists, on which I found my target individual on the Sixth List, 1710, of those on the James & Elizabeth, naming his first wife and telling when she probably died, as well as his sons, all with the first name Johann. Good news!
So the bad luck was that of the Palatine immigrants. Without their bad luck, Governor Hunter would have had no need to compile the list of names of the families in need. That’s where the bad luck turned to good luck for genealogists in the 21st century.