Mrs. A. B. roome
			   15 Carver Street
			   Brandon, Vermont

                                             January 26th, 1948

Ruth dear!
    Lets see, I had better answer some of your questions
first - 
 
     My father was at the New York end among the companies 
that two years after his death, formed the United Fruit company.
Cousin Minor Keith was really the founder, and the
Vice President for years.  He spent a great deal of his time
in Costa Rica, and married the daughter of the President.  Had
my father lived, he would have been in on it.  I am sure
you remrmber my telling you about a coup of "Fortune" that a
lady in Chicago loaned to me to read, and several pages of
it wer devoted to a biography of Cousin Minor and what he
had accomplished, and that all the trains in Central America
stopped for five minutes at the time of his funeral in 1929.
He built the first railroad in Central America and the first
to cross the Andes.

    As for _our_ Dutch Ancestry, we were direct descendants of 
King William of Holland (Orange), and were supposed to be
some of the numerous heirs to the Trinity Church property in
New York, through Anneke Jans, who, after Jans died, married
a Bogardus.  Once when I met a very charming lady from Georgia
when I was about eighteen , I found out that her name had once
been Bogardus, and shee took me down to the Old Dutch Church
in Fulton Street, New York, and a man in charge there showed
us a book, kept under glass because of its age, in which were
many records of the Bogardus family, but we were not allowed
to touch the book ourselves.  You know, on Grandma's side we
were English and Scotch - from Keith, Scotland.

[Written by Lucile Bogardus, who married Allison Burton Roome.
Father refers to Leonard Bogardus.  "Grandma" apparently refers
to Ruth's Grandmother, Lucile's mother, Julia Keith.  Dutch Ancestry
probably Bogardus or Jans Family (later note - Jans family is definitley
dutch).   - MRW]
[Even later note (5/19/97): Anneke Jans and Roelof Jansen
were apparently Norwegian although some genealogists have thought
they were dutch or swedish  -MRW]