The most notable? Our county’s namesake, Dr. Joseph Warren.

But he was joined on those fields by Captain James Knox, who had enlisted the month before in Captain Samuel Trevett’s artillery company. By the time of the fight in Boston, he had been transferred to the Continental Line in the 37th Regiment.

He re-enlisted on multiple occasions serving through 1779, including service as part of George Washington’s guard starting in May 1777.

After the war, he married Lydia Stratton in Massachusetts and died in 1839 in Windsor, NY.

Photo courtesy of Michelle Gray The grave of Captain James Knox in Broome County, New York.

Flash forward 180 years and his legacy lives on.

His great, great, great, great, great, great granddaughter worked through all of the research needed to verify her familial connection to him in order to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.

That granddaughter is Michelle Gray, current managing director of the Warren County Historical Society.

“It’s very humbling to think, not just necessarily our family members, but what they had to do to fight to win our country,” she said. “I am a relatively new member of the DAR, having aspired to belong for many years.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise given her profession that history has “always been a part of my life.”

She explained that it started as a small child and that “history has always been a part of my life.”

A great aunt was a charter member of a local DAR Chapter and “her sister, my grandmother, Bernice Martin Hunter, was the Triumph Township, Warren County, historian, so stories about our family’s history were always being shared and adorned.”

But that didn’t mean that the research effort required to join the DAR would just appear out of thin air.

Gray credited Judi Wilson who has “been promoting me to do this for years.”

She said she started the process in 2015 but “shelved it for probably a year, year and a half” in 2017. COVID-19 shutdowns provided a “good opportunity to pull it back off the shelf and start working on it.”

The process is much more involved than just sending in a family tree.

“You get online and start to fill it out,” she explained, and “start to see how many gaps you have to fill.”

Gray is seventh generation from Knox.

She worked with her cousin, Michael Miller, a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, “sifting through our family history,”

That lineage starts with Gray, to her mother, Sarah Hunter McLaughlin of Tidioute and grandfather Russell Knox Hunter of Tionesta.

His mother, Mae Knox Hunter, also lived in Tionesta, moving there with her father, Daniel Stowe Knox, a Civil War soldier who served as postmaster in Tionesta. Knox’ father was Captain Knox’s son, William.

The documentation needed to prove lineage for membership in the DAR is extensive – birth records, death records, articles. Gray said she had to submit her and her parents birth and marriage certificates, as well.

“They’ve gotten a lot stricter over the years, the expectations are higher,” Gray said of the documentation required by the DAR, which provides volunteers to assist those seeking to make the connections.

It’s possible to link into lineage already traced to DAR standards but Gray said it “just made sense to start from scratch.” She specifically noted challenges in securing records from the 1770s during the Revolution and back into the 1750s when these soldiers were both.

“Those records are almost impossible,” she said.

It also shouldn’t come as a surprise that Gray enjoyed the experience.

“Look where I work,” she said. “Genealogy is what we do.”

And anyone who has done genealogy works knows that the initial research is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s always more to learn; always more to uncover.

“It’s a big deal,” she said of completing the process of cementing her link to Captain Knox. “It was great. It was fun.”

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