Rector in Christ Church, Manhasset, New York for many years. James was the son of Captain James T. Homans who served in the U.S. Navy. His father has been acknowledged as the first burial at historic Sacramento City Cemetery, being buried 1849. Captain Homans wrote many letters to his eldest son James Homans (then 14 years old) while he away from home and stationed in New Orleans, and several locations in the West Indies, is that he missed his family and tried to be a long-distance father to his six children. He often wrote of his ships and duties, but largely he wrote as a solicitous father, telling his children, and James in particular, of his hopes for their betterment, and his disappointments in their spelling or lack of letter writing to him. His loneliness is pervasive, as when he notes his disappointment that his son Henry was not allowed by his mother to come visit him in New Orleans: "I am sadly lonesome and were Henry here I could be in some measure reconciled to my exile from the rest of you." He encourages his son James to improve his spelling: "I think you can spell correctly without referring to the dictionary. I do not name them (the words James spelled incorrectly) to find fault but to make you more careful hereafter." He consistently ends his letters with the words "with love to you all, I remain your affectionate father, J.T. Homans." Although his letters are sent to his son James, he references other family members, as in this comment about his daughter Libby's pet chicken that sleeps with her: "How's Lib's chicken, the darlingest one I ever saw; does it 'gose to sleep' yet when she does? Tell her to keep it until I see her, then she can have a nice soup or fricassee it for me." Regarding another daughter, Martha, who has taken little pains to write to him, he says he hopes one day to be settled with all his children when he "can judge for himself whether their habits are so imperative that an average of one minute per day cannot with all propriety be spared to address an absent father." For his daughter Libby, he tells James that he will bring her "lots of shells from the bottom of the sea that gales and storms loosed and washed up........she is the only one of the family that knows how to care for things when she gets them, as well as the only one of you all that has said in a letter to her absent father that she misses him." In a letter from Curacao, later in 1848, he asks about his mother, 'Grandma Homans', saying he wonders if she is still among the living and then somewhat philosophically and/or cynically writes: "Her time to pay the debt to nature is in all human probability so near at hand if not already past, that I am prepared to hear at any moment of her departure". In one of his last letters to James in December of 1848, he writes: "The old adage that no day knoweth what the morrow will bring forth." Although he is referencing some ship business, it is a prescient quote. Seven months later, in July of 1849, Captain Homans was buried at City Cemetery in Sacramento. Whether he was ever reunited if life with any of his family is unclear. One of his sons, William, would choose to reunite with him after death. His son William who died about a decade after his father, requested that his body be sent to California and buried alongside his father. (Captain James Homan was the son of Benjamin and Martha Homans. He married Elizabeth Kay 9/6/1829; they were the father of six children (Martha; James; Elizabeth 'Libby', Henry, William, and John).

(The letters to James Homans from his father, Captain James Homans, are available on the internet on the website 'Shared and Spared2')