In 2004, I found in the family archives an old photograph of a handsome lady, Ella Putnam, intriguingly labeled, “Our great-grandmother.” This photograph seemed an embodiment of my grandmother’s reports, forty years earlier, of descent from the celebrated Revolutionary War General Israel Putnam. I wondered, who was the “we” of “our great-grandmother?”

This was what got me started on the genealogical quest. It took me several years to figure out that the Putnams involved were not those of Israel Putnam's family, but a family of Pootmans originally from Holland. It contributed considerably that there were two Ella Putnams born the same year living in the same small community. I made what seemed at the time, and still seems, a reasonable assumption. It just happened to have been mistaken. I think that a few such mistakes are inherent in the work of genealogy. There is less often proof beyond a reasonable doubt, more often a very persuasive document or collection of circumstantial evidence,

Ella may have been a boarder in the family of T. Welsh in Wayne, New York, in 1870, which includes a female E. Putnam, aged 17. He was a wagon maker.186 If so, this would supply a possible connection for her marriage to Henry Forrester, who drove wagons.