Mr. Sears is of an excellent family; his parents were both natives of the Empire State, his father, James, Sr., born in Orange County, and the mother, in her girlhood Miss Hester Rutan, in Sullivan County.
The Rutans were of German descent.
He [James Sears Jr] departed this life in March, 1888, at the old homestead, when ninety-six years old. The mother had preceded her aged partner only a few weeks, dying in February of that year, at the age of seventy-eight. She was a good woman in the highest sense of the term, and a conscientious member of the Methodist Episcopal Church.