“Thanks you so much for your recent letter about the Gazley clan. All I know about the genealogy of my branch of the family is summarized in the chart above [not shown here]. I am sorry I do not know earlier generations. I think our branch of the family have consistently spelled the name with an e rather than an a. Once when I was in England I met Sir Stephen Gaselee who helped me with some research. Did you know that there is a tiny village in Suffolk county in England named Gazely? I visited it in 1938. It is a charming place, just a crossroads. There are no Gazleys living there.

My branch of the family had their homestead in Dutchess County, New York. The village where the homestead was located was Staatsburgh. It is a thoroughly delightful little house, very unpretentious, with severe classical lines. It is located near Hyde Park where F. D. R. was brought up. My uncle by marriage knew the Roosevelt family. He was a cousin also of Alf Landon. His name was Sextus Landon.

My father and his two brothers, Elnathan and Raymond, were all hotel men. Uncle Raymond was manager of a large hotel in Clarksburg, W. Virginia. My father started the Small Palantine Hotel in Newburgh, N.Y. He became room clerk at the Waldorf in N.Y. City and then became manager of the St. Regis, and later at the Chicago Lafatte Hotel. For some years he was in Dallas. My sister and I had great thrills at having lunch at the St. Regis with my father. He died in his early ’sixties from heart and bladder trouble.

My sister Madeline Gazley Wood married Orla Wood, an engineer with the G. E. in Schenectady, N.Y., where she lived most of her life. She is now 86 years old and in a retirement home. She has had much tragedy in her life. Her oldest daughter, Joann Wood Sayles, developed multiple sclerosis as a young woman. Her younger daughter, Joyce Van Patten, died of a heart attack in the church where she was attending the funeral of her father, still a relatively young man. My sister has six grandchildren and one great grandchild.

As a young child, I was brought up in Harlem, New York City. Then we moved to White Plains, New York, where I attended high school. I attended Amherst College and graduated in 1917. After a short period of service in World War I, I took courses in the Columbia University Graduate School in the Department of History.

I taught European History for three years at Columbia, and then came to Dartmouth in 1923 and taught Modern Europe and World History and International Relations until my retirement in 1962. I have published two large books and several pamphlets and articles. My first book was “American Opinion of German Unification, 1848-1871,” published in 1926 by the Columbia University Press. The second book was “The Life of Arthur Young,” published in 1973 by the American Philosophical Society. During the last few years I have developed Parkinson’s Disease. The progress of the disease has been arrested, but I have trouble walking, eating, writing (as you can see), getting into and out of cars, etc. I am 91 years old.

I have made five trips to western and central Europe. In 1950 I was on the civilian faculty at the National War College in Washington. In the academic year 1964-65 I was a visiting professor in English History at the University of Illinois in Champagne, Illinois.

In your letter you mentioned talking with my two sons, Richard Harold and Lawrence John Gazley. Richard has one child, a son, Richard H. Gazley, Jr. Lawrence has three children, a son, John Vincent Gazley, and two daughters, Barbara Gazley and Pamela Gazley.”