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From Nothing so Strange - Arthur Ford

One night I dropped into a meeting where a psychic was doing some open reading. He described my father and grandfather, then both dead, and reported that they were insistently saying a word that sounded like neversink. Neversink. He ran the words together, emphatically. Certainly the message meant nothing to me and I wrote off the medium.

 A few weeks after the neversink message I was in a small town in the western part of New York State when I saw a road sign: TEN MILES TO NEVERSINK.

There was that word again.

The short of it is that I went to the village of Neversink and after inquiry was directed to a very old lady named Lucy Ford Hornbeck. She readily described her brother, Albert Ford, who had died some years previous, and showed me his photograph.

There was my grandfather with my grandmother and my father, then a boy; the same photograph my father had treasured all his life. It seems my grandfather had not been drowned when his ship was wrecked but had been injured and ill. By the time he got back to Florida he could find no trace of his wife and son.

Those were the tumultuous reconstruction days. Concluding that they were dead, he returned and lived to a ripe old age in New York State. It was from this great-aunt that I found out that my great-grandfather had anglicized the name Fordeaux upon becoming an American citizen. So my mother, of Huguenot descent, had married a Frenchman. Some way I had always supposed the name Ford to be lrish.