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Rebecca May Story Kingston, NJ (1872-1975)

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She grew up in Kinston, New Jersey, in the late 1800’s with her family and working on a farm.  She was one of seven children of Joseph and Helen Merrill.  The land which was her familys farm in Kinston is now a nursery adjacent to the railroad tracks.  The Merrills were a Devout Family, and Sunday was a day of rest and church going.  Her brothers and sisters walked four and a half miles every Sunday morning to attend church and Sunday school at the Witherspoon Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey.

Her husband Oscar was a widower from the south, when the Civil War was going on when he was a little boy.  He did not know how to read or write, so he though they were going to sell him as a black man.  When he was seven or eight years old and worked for a Colonel McDonnell on a plantation.  Colonel McDonnell had parents living up in the north, so he sent Oscar to work for them; this is when he and Rebecca Merrill married in 1901.  And became the mother of his four-year old daughter.

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