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Stafford high student gets wingman
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Princesses, their escorts have a ball
Fredericksburg chamber presents awards
FEBRUARY 5, 2016
VOLUME 27, NUMBER 47
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Stafford supervisors OK proffers TRACY BELL
Stafford County Sun
Bertrand Ewell Trenis and Martha Fox were married July 5, 1838. They lived at Oak Hill, a plantation located in what is now the west side of the Quantico Marine Corps base. Oak Hill is now in ruins and the family graveyard where Bertrand and Martha are buried was unknown until their great-great-great granddaughter located it late last year with the help of base archaeologist Kate Roberts. SUBMITTED Alicia Osgood visits the ruins of her great-great-great grandparents’ house, Landsdown, on Dec. 21. Osgood searched for the location of her family’s house and cemetery for five years. PHOTO BY ADELE UPHAUS-CONNER
Family cemetery found aboard Quantico Marine Corps base ADELE UPHAUS-CONNER
Northern Virginia Media Services
n 2011, Alicia Osgood sent her first e-mail to Quantico Marine Corps base asking for help locating the graves of her great-great-great grandparents, Bertram and Martha Trenis, who lived on what is now the west side of the base and died in 1858 and 1877 respectively. It was not until last December that she finally was able to place a bouquet of evergreens, yellow roses and white tulips on the deteriorated foundation of the pre-1812 family home, which is located in the 16 Alpha and 17 Bravo sections of the west side near the border with Prince William County. Adjacent to the foundation is a collection of fern-filled hollows in the forest floor — all that remains of the Trenis family cemetery. After an odyssey of five years, Osgood said it feels “pretty amazing” to have found her ancestors.
“It was nice to be in the spot where they rest,” she said. “It’s a peaceful place and beautiful even in stark winter. There are remnants there of the life they lived — in my head, I can picture the house, hear wagon wheels, the clink of bone china, the swish of hoop skirts. I feel their presence here.” There are 74 known graveyards on Quantico, according to base archaeologist Kate Roberts. The Trenis cemetery is one of possibly many more that remain unidentified, waiting quietly for family genealogists to hunt them down. “You have to have tenacity and patience to be a genealogist,” Osgood said. Osgood’s interest in genealogy began while she was working part-time at Barnes and Noble to pay for the apartment she’d just bought. A woman came to pick up a book she had ordered. The surname “Osgood” was on the hold slip and Alicia mentioned that it was her last name as well. The woman turned out to be a membership recruitment officer for the Daughters
of the American Revolution. At the first meeting Osgood attended, the genealogy bug bit her. She found learning about her distant relatives to be a healing process, repairing the emotional wounds of growing up in a dysfunctional family. “It gives me a sense of self, a sense of value,” she explained. While researching her mother’s family, Osgood learned about her maternal greatgreat-great grandparents, Bertram and Martha Trenis, and their home, Landsdown, on a plantation of around 100 acres called Oak Hill. Besides the house, a school, a store and a church were also on the land. Martha Trenis had inherited the property from her father and that intrigued Osgood. “She was a female landowner,” Osgood said. “And she was widowed before the Civil War, so she was raising her eight children and managing the farm herself. She was this petite but formidable woman.” CEMETERY The house was burned PAGE 2 during the Civil War
The Stafford County Board of Supervisors unanimously agreed Tuesday to designate $1.8 million in anticipated proffers to the Courthouse Road and U.S. 1 intersection improvement project. The Abberly proffer funds stem from Abberly at Stafford Courthouse — a proposed development from the HHHunt Corporation of 288 multi-family units between U.S. 1 and Old Potomac Church Road in Stafford County. Going forward, the developer would make a contribution of $6,499 per multifamily unit constructed on the property, to be used for transportation purposes, a background document states. The proffer statement also allows for the allocation of funds toward student capacity improvements at Brooke Point High School if doing so is deemed a higher priority. The project, which is in the design phase, is expected to decrease traffic at the intersection, and the proffers are meant to assist the county with its cost share, which equals about $4.3 million within phase one. Also at the meeting, the board of supervisors: • heard a presentation from Stafford County Public Schools Superintendent Bruce Benson, who updated the board on a variety of schools system plans. “We have a lot of work to do before the school board brings its request to the supervisors,” Benson said of the Fiscal 2017 budget proposal. Benson presented his own proposed budget last month to the school board, and the school board will in turn make its final request to the Stafford County BOS PAGE 2 Board of Supervisors.
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