From Klinesville to Flemington.

Long before Donald Melick grew up on a dairy farm near Oldwick, another part of his family belonged to the roads and villages around Flemington. The Klines, Van Sickles, Robersons and Runks moved through the same county, making households that would eventually meet in Don's family tree.

The crossroads called Klinesville

Henry Miller Kline, born in 1807 and usually called Miller, came of age in a Hunterdon County where a tavern could be as important as a crossroads. People stopped to eat, exchange news, do business, and find their way between farms and villages. The settlement northwest of Flemington carried the family name: Klinesville.

Miller kept a tavern there during the 1830s. He also dealt in land and moved between occupations as the county changed. The 1850 census described him as a farmer in Raritan Township, and a local postal-history register named Miller Kline as Klinesville's postmaster beginning in January of that year. A single person's work could touch travelers, farmers, customers and neighbors alike.

Two marriages, one expanding household

In 1832, Miller married Rachel Ann Kuhl. Their life together was brief. Rachel died in 1838, leaving young children and a husband to begin again. Three years later, on January 19, 1841, he married Mary Roberson, whose family lived around Baptistown and Kingwood Township.

Mary was the daughter of William Roberson and Sarah West, from another network of long-established Hunterdon families. Together, Miller and Mary raised children, including Cornelia Bonnell Kline, born in 1846. Cornelia would marry James Van Sickle; their daughter Mary Lynn would one day marry Walter Cameron Melick. Through her, both the Kline and Roberson histories became part of Don's family.

William Roberson appears in local newspaper notices as more than a name on a pedigree. An 1840 announcement credits him with performing a marriage for two neighbors. When he died in October 1865, at eighty, the newspaper remembered his nearly fifty years in the Methodist Episcopal Church. Sarah survived until 1880. Their lives were anchored in Baptistown even as their children's households spread elsewhere in the county.

A visit remembered in a diary

By the beginning of the Civil War, Miller and Mary were living in Flemington. In 1861 Benjamin Harvey Ellicott, recently arrived from Baltimore with his family, noted a caller in his diary: “Mrs. Miller Kline.” It was very likely Mary.

We do not know what brought her to the door or what they spoke about. But the small entry is something the land records cannot give us. It catches an ordinary social gesture in an extraordinary year, and leaves the impression of a family present in its community, not simply counted in it.

Manuel goes to war—and comes home

The war would touch the Kline household more directly. Cornelia's brother Manuel Kuhl Kline served with the 15th New Jersey Infantry. He became a first sergeant and later an officer. Among the photographs that survive from the regiment is the group shown above, with Manuel named in its archival identification.

In August 1881, veterans of the 15th returned to Flemington for a regimental reunion. A contemporary account describes a procession directed by Captain Manuel Kline. Along the route, the men stopped at Miller Kline's residence, where they were received and offered refreshments. We do not have their private words; what survives is the public scene of a son leading fellow veterans to his father's home.

The gathering brought the family's changing world into view: tavern and post office, county town and battlefield, then a familiar doorway after the war. Miller died in 1884.

A sister's home, and a journey west

Mary Roberson Kline had siblings whose lives carried the family in different directions. Her sister Letitia Roberson married George Runk, a man who had grown up around his father's gristmill in Kingwood Township. George's father, John Runk, had served in Congress in the 1840s. George himself traveled to California around 1850 or 1851 and remained there for years before returning east.

He died in July 1887, in Pennsylvania, and was buried back in Hunterdon County. The next March, Letitia was visiting her sister Mary at her Flemington home when she became suddenly ill and died that evening. A local newspaper also named their brother Ogden Roberson.

There is no need to invent the conversations between the sisters or explain why Letitia was there. The fact that they were together is moving enough. George had crossed a continent; Letitia's last recorded evening was spent with her sister.

What Cornelia carried forward

In the middle of these stories stands Cornelia, the daughter of Miller and Mary. Her descendants would know names like Van Sickle and Melick, and later remember farms, orchards and dairies around Oldwick. But behind those places were other lives: a first wife lost young, a mother visiting new neighbors, a brother back from war, an aunt who traveled west by marriage and came home, and a family that kept opening its doors.

None of them could have known how their paths would be joined in a family history generations later. These are some of the moments that remained.