But the book is probably without any
definite purpose that can be told in a statement.
ANSWER TO AN INSISTING FRIEND
You ask for items, details of my early life--of genealogy and
parentage, particularly of the women of my ancestry, and of its
far-back Netherlands stock on the maternal side--of the region where
I was born and raised, and my mother and father before me, and theirs
before them--with a word about Brooklyn and New York cities, the times
I lived there as lad and young man. You say you want to get at these
details mainly as the go-befores and embryons of "Leaves of Grass."
Very good; you shall have at least some specimens of them all. I
have often thought of the meaning of such things--that one can only
encompass and complete matters of that kind by 'exploring behind,
perhaps very far behind, themselves directly, and so into their
genesis, antecedents, and cumulative stages. Then as luck would have
it, I lately whiled away the tedium of a week's half-sickness
and confinement, by collating these very items for another (yet
unfulfilled, probably abandon'd,) purpose; and if you will be
satisfied with them, authentic in date-occurrence and fact simply, and
told my own way, garrulous-like, here they are. I shall not hesitate
to make extracts, for I catch at anything to save labor; but those
will be the best versions of what I want to convey.
GENEALOGY--VAN VELSOR AND WHITMAN
The later years of the last century found the Van Velsor family, my
mother's side, living on their own farm at Cold Spring, Long Island,
New York State, near the eastern edge of Queen's county, about a mile
from the harbor.
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