Archibald Armstrong Cemetery: Notes
Archibald Armstrong and his family were the first settlers in Italy Hollow, arriving in 1794, according to Stafford C. Cleveland's 1873 History of Yates County. They were there by 1800 certainly, as they appear on the census as a man and woman with a single male child under the age of 10; they were living adjacent to Alexander Porter, who was married to Armstrong’s sister Catharine.
Both men were veterans of the Revolution, as was in a sense Catharine Armstrong Porter, since she was taken by the Indians during the war and had been ransomed in Canada after several years in captivity.
The Armstrongs were still in the same neighborhood in 1810, along with several more children, but Archibald sold the farm in 1817, without his wife’s signature. Cleveland says she died there and was buried in the orchard, and there was still a picket fence around her grave in his day, more than 50 years later. No burial ground was reserved in Armstrong’s or in any subsequent deed, so presumably hers was the only burial there, and it did not, as in the case of some family grounds, develop into a neighborhood cemetery.