Visitors to Sand Run

Many people lived or visited Sand Run over the 60 years that it was owned by the Bertsches. The house was large enough to hold the Eugene (Ganey) and Mame (O'Connell) Bertsche family full time, some of Ganey's relatives for years at a time, and many summer visitors from both the Bertsche and O'Connell families. Visitors often stayed overnight, sometime for weeks. Nobody needed a TV, and young visitors always had children living at Sand Run to play with and keep them entertained.

The next two charts show four generations of Bertsches and O'Connells. Visitors to Sand Run are highlighted in yellow, while anyone who called Sand Run their home at some point in their life is highlighted in blue. All of Mame's living siblings and parents visited, as they all lived up the hill in Antrim, PA. While many of the Bertsches moved from Antrim to New York and other states, quite a few of them managed to make their way back to Sand Run to visit their father/grandfather Arnold Sr. and their brother/uncle Ganey.

This last chart illustrates how busy the house was with full-time residents. Lydia finally moved to Sand Run when she left her second husband and sold her home in Rochester, NY. She stayed until the birth of her only grandchild, Barbara Jean Von Eisenhauer. Lydia moved to Detroit to live with her son Harold and daughter-in-law Thelma Stealy Von Eisenhauer, a professional opera singer. Thelma added "Von" to her and Harold's last name to sound more distinguished, and Lydia changed her last name to match when she moved to Detroit.

Arnold and Bessie Bertsche and family moved around a lot, spending two stints at Sand Run. Arnold and Bessie were living with recently widowed Lydia and her son in Rochester, NY in 1910 when they had their first child. Lydia's decision to purchase half of Sand Run and let Arnold's family live there probably reflected the strain of having Arnold and Bessie start a large family in a crowded house in Rochester. Arnold's family left after the end of the Spanish Flu epidemic for a new job, but they returned with their younger children shortly after Lydia left for Detroit.

Not long after Arnold's family left for the second time, Elizabeth "Pete" Bertsche needed a place to stay. Her husband Roscoe "Ray" Boynton died in 1945, she had no children, and there was room at Sand Run and adult nieces running the house. She stayed until 1959, when Louise Bertsche and May, Jack, and daughter Kathryn Willard moved to a newly purchased home in Wellsboro, PA so that Kathryn could walk to school. The house at Sand Run continued to be occupied full time in the summers when school was out.

Betty Bertsche moved out of Sand Run in the 1930s when she married violinist Paul Patt and moved first to Morris, PA, and later to New York state to raise a family. After having two sons who died as infants and raising one daughter Donna, Betty had the misfortune of having her husband walk out on Christmas Eve 1945 and never return. Betty earned a position as a registered nurse at St. Joseph's Hospital, Elmira, NY, but she could not take care of her daughter at the same time, so Donna came to live at Sand Run with her aunts May and Louise and Grandpa Ganey. Betty visited often, but her nursing career was too disruptive to raise Donna on her own, so Donna was raised by her aunts Louise and May and later uncle Jack until she graduated from Mansfield State University, got her masters degree from Rutgers University, and started her career as a Senior High math teacher. In an interesting change of events, Betty ended up raising the three young sons from her brother Charles after his wife divorced him in the 1960s.