Genealogy & Family History Community
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Leave the blood feuds at home
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I don't have a lot of documentation on my family (in terms of land records, newspaper articles, etc.), but there are a fair number of photographs ... and stories. And where there aren't those, well, I'm not shy about letting my imagination fill in any "gaps" about what may have been true (noting same). So, I was pleased to take up a spot during Womens' History Month to relate the stories of several of my ancestresses, few of whom had much to do with farming, or pioneering. Many of them were ...
suburban stay at home moms, long before the minivan was ever on any drawing board. The first group contains one individual who gave up outside employment upon marriage, one who entered the labor force later out of necessity, and a third whose story ... had issues, as they say.
Amazing that I can recognize my maternal grandmother, Dorothy, in a photo taken so many years before I was born (probably snapped in the spring of 1930 near Boston) – she’s in the center between her mother (left), Vera, and future mother-in-law (right), Mabel. And, yes, Nana Dot was quite … petite.
Mabel was born in Maine during the Civil War, although her family moved to Worcester, MA when she was a child. Story goes that she would chide her husband about being a “hick” as he stayed up there through high school. Mabel was among the early graduates of Worcester State Teachers’ College, working at that profession until her sons were born in 1901/02. Her husband died not long after this photo was taken, after which she managed the family land holdings in the Franklin-Wrentham area. No, not baronial manors, but lots and lots of … little lots. My great-grandfather apparently bought up stray pieces as a “hobby” – my mom still gets named in title pleadings to this day. A couple of years back my mother was lamenting that when she’d go over to visit her grandmother, she’d be served bland Lorna Doone cookies, to which her cousin replied, “I don’t remember ever getting a single cookie of any kind there!” Mabel died in 1958.
Vera was my most recent “immigrant” ancestor, as she was born near Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in 1880, youngest of three sisters. She and her husband left NS for Boston not long after their 1904 wedding, with my grandmother coming along two years later … barely. Story has it that her doctor hadn’t followed through with proper hygienic procedure, transmitting meningitis from a previous patient. Vera was struck with a serious case, needing complete rehabilitation. My grandmother knew the British manual alphabet, explaining that was how (Canadian)Vera communicated when Dot was a little girl. She did recover by the 1920’s, though unfortunately, she relapsed permanently before my mom was born. My grandmother would visit Vera periodically at a nursing home in Vermont until her mother’s death in 1966; her father had passed away 20 years earlier.
Dot seems to have had a fairly normal childhood, in spite of her mother’s illness. After graduating from high school in Somerville, MA, she attended a conservatory to study music. At around that time, Vera was having students from Boston University law school over for get-togethers, being single and so far from home and all. One of them, Bob, eventually became her son-in-law in 1930. Dot found herself divorced just over ten years later, with three children aged 10, 9 and 3 to support (my grandfather’s child support being both minimal, and sporadic). So, she transferred her piano experience to keyboarding, working as an executive secretary from the 1940’s to the 1970’s, putting my mother and aunt through college. After retiring, she suffered a serious accident, receiving monthly payment from her landlord’s insurance company. A generation later she expressed the concern, “Gosh – I hope they don’t go under before I do!” She passed away not long after her 99th birthday party in 2005, which I attended.
Dramatis Personae: Grace, Charlotte, Minnie, Merretta (left to right standing), Grace (daughter of Grace) seated with infant Jack. Photo taken in spring 1929 (NJ).
Jack -> Grace -> Grace -> Charlotte
Jack -> (John) -> Meretta -> Minnie
We'll start these branches off with Minnie's story. Born c. 1850 in Troy, NY - where her father's occupation is given as either "hostler" or "restaurateur," leading me to suspect the family ran some sort of inn. She's the youngest, by a fair bit, of five sisters; I did learn very recently of a brother who died as a toddler. She and John married in 1871, heading off thereafter to Michigan (his clan decamped there en masse), and later Ohio, where they lived until John's death in 1925. He started with nothing, becoming quite wealthy through patents and manufacturing by the turn of the century. My folks and I traveled to Dayton to see the house where my great-aunt was trapped with them during the Great Flood of 1913. Minnie left a journal of their world trip ... abbreviated by America's entry into World War I. After being widowed, she moved into an flat across the hall from her daughter's in Jersey City for the final 13 years of her life. She eschewed her maiden name of Filkins, in favor of her middle name "Smith" leading me to wonder if her home life hadn't been ... troublesome.
Her daughter Merretta, with the stole (a fox chewing on its own tail???), was born during the family's early Michigan days. At my folks recently I ran across an 1899 multi-page letter from her future husband to her father, requesting permission to date. John must've liked what he read as they were married within a year (Bill came from a "good" family, no fortune hunter he). Merretta lived the most "consistently comfortable" life of all these women, with servants all her life. However, that didn't spare her from a newspaper headline DAYTON FLOODED: MANY DEATHS! not long after her little girl arrived to visit; it took days to find out John, Minnie and Ellie's fates. Both of Merretta's sons died young within a year of each other (1938/39), while her daughter's marriage was ... highly problematic. There is a picture of her with her kids c. 1910 in which she has completely white hair, at barely 40. She died in 1955 of cancer.
Moving to the other side of the family, we have Charlotte, whose life was anything but easy at any time. Born in NYC in 1843, she was orphaned at a young age, being raised by her Stillwell siblings. She married Adolph, a German-Jewish immigrant, in 1864, in a Unitarian ceremony - what else! They ended up having seven children, five of whom survived to adulthood. Adolph died in 1877 in a ... mysterious accident far from home, leaving her a destitute widow. I have a death cert of one of the boys, who died in an asylum (scarlet fever) on Christmas Eve 1881. She never remarried, moving from Harlem to Connecticut to her son's house in Yonkers, NY, where she died in 1940. Married 13 years, widow for next 63. She was probably one of the last to receive a Civil War survivor pension check (every month for 50 years).
I profiled Charlotte and Grace in this diary, but didn't go into the details of Grace's life, some of which I only learned recently. Her brother wasn't the only one sent to an asylum, as I ran across her admission record at Ancestry not long ago. She did graduate from (what is now) Hunter College in Manhattan; my parents told me that she had waged a successful suit for equal pay with her male colleagues in the city school system. She married in 1903, after a very long engagement (her fiance worried they never had enough money) to my great-grandfather, who had left school to work in his father's business; so, a century ago they were a couple nearly as rare as unicorns - the wife a college grad and the husband barely finished high school (if at all). Her husband committed suicide in 1912, and she was a widow for the next 45 years. Grace suffered from arthritis, so work would've been difficult for her, but she managed to invest her husband's money well enough to keep up two houses (winter and summer), put my grandmother through private high school , and my great-aunt through Vassar (phi beta kappa).
My grandmother was the one who found her father, shot in heart, at the home in Westchester County, NY they'd left Harlem for. Her later mental health challenges were deemed to have stemmed from being forced to repress that situation in favor of moving to a town where the family was unknown (Montclair, NJ), keeping up an official story that he died of "heart failure" (ahem - hearts do stop working when hit by bullets!) My grandfather died (of a stroke) in 1939, leaving Grace a 25 year-old widow with a 10 year old son to raise. The story goes that John had just made the first payment on a life ins policy that the company finally agreed to pay out. That certainly had to add to existing abandonment issues. She remained a stay-at-home mom, with help from Merretta and her husband, never remarrying over the next 60 years. That's three women (grandmother, daughter, granddaughter) who were married a total of 33 years and widows 164 years between them!
Here we have the "baby" at grade school age, in one of the only pictures of my grandfather as an adult. I thought I'd add them in here as Minnie and Merretta were their foremothers. John was a typewriter sales representative, and said to be rather a jock - a gene my brother and I sure as hell never inherited, although our dad Jack was an avid golfer. As he passed away so long before I was born, I think of John's ancestors as my great-aunt Ellie's "family" (she was the only relative who lived near us) rather than "my grandfather's kin." I'll close this discussion with my grandmother Grace's reply "Because we could never afford more!" to my childhood inquiry as to why my dad was an only child.
Likely next on my agenda will likely be Minnie's mother's family, where I'll have to sit down and put together everything I know about them in a proposal to an upstate New York researcher to see what can be realistically determined, and what items are haystack needles.
Which lines are you folks tackling these days?
(P. S. -- wrestling with Photobucket took as long as composing the text - ARGH!)