586 Edivard Livingston Youmans. 



Jeremiah, the second son of John Youmans, in the year 

 1 791, at the age of twenty-three, married Margaret Vincent, 

 the fifth child of Levi Vincent, a resident of Coeymans, and 

 the young couple began their married life upon a portion 

 of the paternal two hundred acres, to which more were 

 added from adjacent new land belonging to the same land- 

 lord. Here Vincent Youmans, their second son and the 

 father of E. L. Youmans, was born in 1794. Here his 

 mother, Margaret Vincent Youmans, died in 1801, leaving 

 six little children; here Samuel Youmans died at a great 

 age in 1797, and John Youmans a few years later. Vin- 

 cent Youmans distinctly remembered his great-grandfather, 

 whom he saw daily in the early years of his life. At the 

 death of his mother, when he was seven years old, Vincent 

 went to live with his mother's parents — was chosen from 

 the little flock, no doubt, because of his name. He always 

 spoke of their place as "home," but it was only a mile 

 away from his father's house, where he was a daily visitor. 



Nothing certain is know^n of the origin of Samuel You- 

 mans, but it is not improbable that his father or grand- 

 father were among the early colonists of New England. 

 There were Yeamans, Yeomans, and Youmans in and about 

 Boston, Ipswich, and New Haven in i633-'39-'5o, and 

 emigration to Long Island from Massachusetts and Con- 

 necticut colonies began before 1650. The various spellings 

 of the name are, of course, not the slightest bar to the sup- 

 position that they all descended from the same stock, for 

 everywhere before the nineteenth century there was extreme 

 carelessness about the spelling of names, as, indeed, about 

 sjielling in general. The same name will be found spelled 

 in one way in the body of an old local history and will be 

 referred to by another spelling in the index. But, whether 

 four or six generations of Americanization be allowed, 

 Samuel Youmans and his descendants seem to have been 

 perfectly assimilated to the American type of character. 



