Cornelia Goodrich was 44 years old when her grandmother, Catharine Breese, died, and her grandmother had been 20 years old when Major Henry died. This meant that the stories Cornelia was raised with came directly from a contemporary of the Major. So Cornelia was raised with someone who had first hand stories of Major Henry.

Feeling it was important that the authorship of the poem be corrected, Cornelia wrote to Benson Lossing, a famous Dutchess County historian, hoping he would take the family's case for Henry's authorship public. Unfortunately, though Lossing was interested, Cornelia didn't have the smoking gun evidence Lossing felt he needed.

While Cornelia's stories came to her by way of her grandmother, a contemporary of Major Henry, Henry Livingston of Long Island NY received his stories directly from the Major's son Sidney, Long Island Henry's father. The Major's grandson was the first member of the huge Livingston clan to publish the Major's authorship of "A Visit from St. Nicholas" in Long Island Henry's own newspaper, the South Side Signal, in 1899.

Sidney's children added to the tapestry of rich memories of the Livingston family. All of Sidney's children were told by their father that Sidney remembered his father reciting his newly composed poem. Sidney's daughter Lavinia wrote: "My father said his father wrote it, and we children believed it. Emphatically and were proud of it. Aunt Susan Gurney (Henry and Jane's daughter) also told me that Grandfather Livingston wrote it, she ought to know, being right there in the house and seeing her father every day."

The children also remembered Sidney's story of finding the original, corrected manuscript of the Christmas poem after Major Henry's death. Upon Sidney's death, that manuscript was passed on to Sidney's brother Edwin, who lost it in a house fire while he was living with their sister Susan in Wisconsin.

This story, while frustrating, points up the fact that no corrected, original manuscript was ever found to back up Clement Moore's claim to the poem. By way of an after the fact explanation, a deposition given by a Moore family member finessed the problem by relating Moore's explaination that no corrected copy existed because he composed the poem full blown in his head, and wrote it down in essentially published, final form.

Since Henry's daughter Jane died the year before her grandson William was born, Dr. Thomas only heard the family stories secondhand from his father, Henry Livingston Thomas. But what he did hear was enough to fire his blood.

Before he was called up for military service in the first World War, Dr. Thomas had thrown himself into the quest to prove Major Henry's authorship, The previous generation had gathered much of the material, and Thomas' passion excited them to believe that here was the person who would be able to finally make their case. From all branches of the family, the documents were searched out and forwarded to Dr. Thomas.

A fine researcher, Dr. Thomas searched through old newspaper collections hoping to find the published version of the poem spoken of by the family. But even if those stories were true, the issue in which it was published was long lost.

Returning safe from the war, and frustrated by the lack of a smoking gun, Dr. Thomas dove into an analysis of what he did have. The result was an excellent article which he published in the Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook for 1919.

Although Dr. Thomas's stylistic analysis was convincing to many, the weight of Moore's name on the cover of so many volumes of the famous poem made the struggle to keep Livingston's name before the public an uphill battle. But Dr. Thomas never gave up trying. The articles written under his inspiration over the decades made a solid foundation on which latter researchers built.

James Denig was the son of Jeanne Livingston (Hubbard) Denig, and grew up with Jeanne's family stories of Henry Livingston and the Christmas poem. These were stories that Jeanne had heard directly from her grandmother Eliza, the young girl who lived next door to the Livingston family, and who had married Henry and Jane's oldest son Charles, a favorite child with whom Major Henry kept in warm and loving correspondence

Eliza and Charles had both told their children of hearing Major Henry recite the poem to his family many years before it first appeared in the Troy Sentinel. Although Charles died before Jeanne was born, Jeanne was 22 years old before her grandmother Eliza died, so Jeanne heard directly from someone who was there. It was Jeanne's mother Jane who had first discovered Moore taking credit for the poem around 1860. Eliza told her daughter that the mistake should be corrected.

Jeanne wrote 11 letters to William S. Thomas filled with memories and passion, even beginning her own styalistic analysis comparing the poetry of Henry's son Edwin to the Visit poet. How much more of that passion was she able to pass on to her son James.

With the death of his father, William S. Thomas, the responsibility for continuing Thomas' quest to prove Henry Livingston's authorship of the Christmas poem fell on his son, W. Stephen Thomas. Not ready yet to dive into the research materials to write the article about Henry his father had been planning for the Dutchess County Historical Society, Thomas generously provided his father's papers to Helen Wilkinson Reynolds, a renowned scholar of Dutchess County history. "Editorial Notes on the Writing of Henry Livingston," Dutchess County Historical Society 1942 Yearbook, pp.39-51 focuses on Henry's poetry, rather than on the authorship attribution question.

When he did dive into his treasure trove of documents, W. Stephen discovered that he preferred the task of spreading the word, to writing the words. He was an evangelist, and his enthusiasm was contagious. His major success was in converting Vassar President Henry Noble MacCracken, a literary scholar, to a belief in Henry's authorship Because of Thomas' unstinting efforts to publicize his belief in Henry's authorship of the poem, Unicover issued a Fleetwood First Day Cover calling out Henry as the author of 'A Visit of St. Nicholas."

I tripped into this quest while searching out my father's ancestry in the hopes of finding a cousin who might have a copy of father's book of poetry. I only knew father through the letters he'd sent mother trying to save their marriage. In one he wrote that he'd burned his manuscripts and that the future could do without him. That simple sentence had taken over my life, and I was determined that neither I nor the future was going to do any such thing. But for all my passion and determination, father's poetry was unfindable, and father remained a shadow.

And then I came across a web page saying that my 5th great grandfather might have written 'Night Beroe Christmas.' Another quest. A wrong that needed righting. But maybe this time I could succeed where I'd failed father.

As a retired computer science researcher, it wasn't that difficult to track down Don Foster as the person I needed to help me help Henry. I've started professional organizations and publications, run computer language conferences, and turned a passion for making music videos into a multimedia magazine for an IBM Research VP. I'm smart. I'm passionate. I'm an evangelist and, yes, Don, I'm relentless. It was truly the most joyful research year.

A decade later MacDonald P. Jackson, an emeritus professor from New Zealand, contacted me because he thought there was still research room in the attribution question and he had a different way to approach the problem. We were off and running within a week.

What he needed was data to statistically analyze. The poor man never imagined how much data he was going to get. One of my best friends, Lyn, is a retired big name in computational linguistics. I used to chair the international society for computer languages. My husband Paul put out a paper on "Yet Another ALGOL Compiler" in 1963. He is VERY good with computers. So we explained to Mac that we could give him just about any type of data he might want, suitably computer massaged to make it easy for him to pull out likely trends to examine further.

His initial requests were modest. But I'm someone who enjoys xeroxing, so I suggested he not worry about the effort involved, but just tell us what data he WISHED he could have. And that's what we gave him. We pulled out data with absolutely no understanding of what that data meant for Mac's analysis. We were the miners digging out the raw ore, and Mac was the one sluicing it to find out if there was any gold in a particular creek. (Did I mention that father's father turned out to be a front page, big headline newspaperman and gold miner who won and lost fortunes from Alaska to Central America? Stetson, six-shooter, burro and the rest.)

Oh, and last year (2012) father's book of poetry showed up for sale on the Internet.

Stephen Livingston Thomas was destined to love his ancestor, Henry Livingston. Steve's birth announcement explained that he would have to someday take up the gauntlet for Henry when it became too heavy for his father to carry. And it really is impossible to learn about Henry and not love him. Actually, it's impossible to imagine that Henry wouldn't have loved Steve, too, if they had ever met in some time machine. They share a love of words and images and family. Steve just creates his on the Internet.

Steve has inherited The Thomas Collection - papers by and about Henry that have made their way to Steve from generations of Livingston family members who hoped that somewhere, something would help someone to prove their case. By making those papers available to Don Foster for his book, "Author Unknown," Steve may have finally given those long dead cousins some peace.