Firth Haring Fabend

This little book is for every mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother—and the rest of the family, too. In lyrically beautiful verse, the author and Rockland County native Firth Haring Fabend tells us about nine generations of her “grandmothers,” back to the first to come to Rockland – “a wolf-ridden forest”—in the 1680s.


You will learn of their joys: a baby’s baptism, rocking the cradle, a great-grandmother’s holding a new-born babe, a summer picnic under the trees, a farm whose bounty fed the family, Rockland’s pristine scenery. You will also learn of heart-breaking sorrows: deaths of infants and children, the burdens of being a mother and farmer’s wife, even with the help of slaves in the early days, widowhood, and the destruction of homes, barns, livestock, orchards, and stores of foods—by armies on both sides, and by marauders—during the Revolution.

Firth Fabend’s vignettes of her female ancestors are based on the same solid scholarship that has marked her books and many articles on the Dutch in New York and New Jersey. In the past, historians have focused most of their attention on the original male settlers. Convinced that wives and female relatives deserve recognition as well,
Mrs. Fabend wrote A Catch of Grandmothers to pay tribute in poetry to her nine foremothers and, by extension, to all their nameless sisters, whose role in our history has gone unrecognized and unappreciated.