UNION SPRINGS - Sharing the history of his family, Ray Messenger, great-great-grandson of William H. Seward, said proof of his lineage is as plain as the nose on his face.

"They are my family, so I can share their story," Messenger joked while presenting a slide show of various Seward family members and the Seward House during the Frontenac Historical Society and Museum's annual dinner Wednesday in Union Springs. "There is one genetic feature that has gotten passed through the family, and that is the nose."

Frontenac president Pat Kimber said the Seward family was chosen as the evening's program because their story fit perfectly with Frontenac's mission.

"The Seward house, as well as the family, is a local treasure," she said. "It is a treasure of local history for us."

Messenger spoke of Seward's early years as a young boy wishing to further his education.

"Back then, it was usually one man in the family who went to college," he said. "In Seward's family, it was him. He felt that he needed a suit to attend college in, but a new suit cost $100 from the haberdashery and his father would not pay for it."

Messenger went on to say that was just the beginning of Seward's flair for formal affairs.

"William liked to entertain, and his wife was just the opposite," he said. "Frances Seward was a well-educated woman and was well into women's issues but, to her, travel and extravagant entertaining was hellish. She was raised in a quiet environment and wanted her children raised in the same."

Messenger said the issue is documented in the daily journals of Fanny Seward, the Seward's only daughter to survive infancy.

"Fanny wanted to be a writer when she grew up and she kept diaries of the everyday happenings of the Seward household," he said.

"One entry in the diary talks of her mother's state of mind the day that her father and grandfather brought John Quincy Adams home without Frances Seward's prior knowledge. She was not happy at all about the entourage that had trampled her gardens and knocked down the fence in her yard."

According to Messenger, the Seward house was used by the Seward family until the 1950s, when William H. Seward III willed the home to Cayuga County so that it might become a museum.