1810.] AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 3 



his father died. He used to say that he had only 

 six weeks of schooling ; whether before or after 

 his father's death I ana ignorant. But soon after 

 that event he was apprenticed to a tanner and cur- 

 rier (Mr. Gier) at Sauquoit, in whose employment 

 he must have been for a part of the time after he 

 came of age, for I was born in a little house which 

 had been a shoe- shop on the premises of the tan- 

 yard. 



The fact of being born supposes a maternal ancestry. 

 July 30, 1809, my father married Roxana Howard. 

 She was born in Longmeadow, Mass., March 15, 

 1789 ; was a daughter of Joseph Howard, who was 

 born in Pomfret, Conn., March 8, 1766, and of 

 Submit (Luce) Howard, born at Somers, Conn., 

 April 3, 1767 ; 1 and he was the grandson of John 

 Howard of Ipswich, 2 Mass., and of Elisabeth Smith, 

 of the same town. He was the descendant of Thomas 

 Howard, who, with his wife and children, came from 

 Aylesford (or Maidstone), Kent, in the year 1634. 



My mother came with her parents to Oneida County 

 and the Sauquoit Valley when only a few years old. 3 

 Her father there joined a company which set up an 

 iron-forge. One of the early pieces of work of its 

 trip-hammer was to forge off three of my maternal 



1 She was married in 1788. 



2 The house is still standing which, built in 1648 by an ancestor of 

 Ralph Waldo Emerson, was bought by William Howard, in 1669. 



3 Asa's mother was but four years old, when the family moved to 

 Sauquoit, and well remembered her mother's crying at the crossing of 

 the Hudson River, which must have seemed formidable in the small 

 boats of that time. Joseph Howard was a man of a very lovable 

 character, as shown from the affectionate remembrances of him by bis 

 grandchildren, the eldest of whom, Asa, was much with him. He was 

 a deacon of the First Church in Sauquoit for forty years, and one of 

 the leading men in the town. He died in 1849. 



