Wednesday Wit - Quips From The Past

When some people hear that I enjoy history and genealogy, they get “the look”.  Their face scrunches up, their eyes glaze over, and you can almost see them transported back to their days in high-school where history meant boring lectures about dates and names and places.  They mentally shiver, and sometimes let out an audible “Bleh!”

It’s for those people that I try to share some of the more interesting things that we never learned in school.  In fact, I’ve easily learned more about history reading on my own than I ever did in school, and I would argue that what I’ve learned has been more exciting than any classroom could ever be.

Schools, I think, forget that history is about people.  That’s why I like studying genealogy.  Genealogists study history from the individual out toward the larger events.  We are the historians that get to see that people are people, no matter when they lived, and sometimes people are funny.

One of my favorite finds involved an ancestor of mine, Oliver Wright (1741 – 1820), who was recorded in a local history with this quote: 

“They had a family of twelve children, ten girls and two boys. The old gentleman was wont to boast that he had brought up a ton of girls; and it is a fact that they were all weighed at one time, and averaged two hundred pounds apiece.”[1]

First, I think it’s neat that the author of the history recorded this quip.  Apparently Oliver’s sense of humor was well-known enough to warrant being written down.   

Next, it seems that my family’s sense of humor hasn’t changed much over the years. Well over a hundred years after Oliver Wright’s death, I remember a family reunion where my grandfather stood looking at a pedigree chart hanging on the wall.  Someone nearby noticed him looking at the names of his seven children and asked “Wesley, why’d you have so many kids?"

With a slight grin he dryly said "Winters are cold in Vermont."

[1] Charles A. Bemis, History of the Town of Marlborough, Cheshire County, N.H., With The Report of Its Centennial Celebration in 1876; Also Embracing Genealogies and Sketches of Familes From 1764 to 1880, (Boston, MA: Press of George H. Ellis, 1881), 711.

Marriage Record Monday – How Not to Find What You’re Looking For

Proprietor's Records, Volume 1

One of the assignments for the National Genealogical Society’s Home Study Course is to do a survey of local marriage records.  The idea is to become familiar with what records are available, and to do some on-site research.  Part of the assignment is to find the earliest marriage record at the repository, and compare it to other marriage records from later years.  Simple, right?

Yes, unless you’re an easily distracted history geek.

Early this afternoon, during my lunch break, I visited our local town clerk’s office.  This was actually my second attempt at working on this lesson, as when I visited the town hall last week, no one appeared to be in the office.

The clerk was extremely friendly, asking what she could do for me.  “I was hoping to take a look at the town’s marriage records,” I said.

“What era?” She asked.

“Erm, all of them?” I mumbled.  I then explained that I was working on a research class, and was trying to find the earliest marriage record that I could.

“Ah,” she said, leading me into the vault, “Grab that foot-stool over there.”  She took me to the corner of the vault and pointed to the top shelf.  “There’s volume one.  It could be in there.”

As she left me to my work, I started looking around.  Ledger books filled the walls.  Most of them, it appeared, were land records.  This wasn’t my first time in a records vault, but it had been some time, and I quickly got that “so much information, so little time” feeling.  I dragged the short foot-ladder over to the corner, stepped up, and lifted down Volume 1 of the town’s Proprietor’s Records.  As I started carefully leafing through it, I realized that I was holding original records in my hand, written by a clerk over 250 years ago.

My inner history geek kicked in.

Forget the earliest marriage record.  What about the earliest overall record?  Was that here?  Was it lost?  What else was in this book?  I took the book from the shelf and headed for the research table in the main room.  On my way out of the vault, I spotted another volume.  “Church Records” read the printed spine.  “Right,” I said to myself, “Looking for early marriages, better grab that one too.”  I sat down and started reading, fascinated that I was looking at the first record of the town.  The town charter, written 11 August, 1761, was sitting in front of me in gorgeous English phrases.

“Province of New Hampshire

George the Third, By the Grace of Great Britain France and Ireland King Defender of the Faith…”

I was hooked already.  I looked through the entire book, picking out phrases about land grants, trades, and life in general in the mid-18^th-century.  At some point I remembered to look for marriages.  I opened up the book of church records and copied down the first marriage that I found.  21 Oct, 1882. Being a sucker for anything from the 1700’s, I quickly went back to the first book, keeping in mind that I was looking for recorded marriages, but still mostly seeing land records and town dealings.

At some point I looked up and realized that the town clerk was gone.  She had gone to walk her dog.  Smiling at life in small-town Vermont, and realizing why no one was around last week when I visisted, it was probably at this point that I remembered that I was on my lunch break, and had to go back to my real job in a few minutes.

Grudgingly, I closed the books and put them back in the vault.  As I put my coat on, the town clerk returned.  I thanked her for her time, and told her that I’d likely be back tomorrow.

Hopefully I’ll be able to stay focused.

Sickness Saturday - Influenza 1918

 

Mary Fletcher Hospital (Library of Congress photo)

Some of the bloggers that I follow have recently written about the 1918 Influenza outbreak.  Heather Wilkinson Rojo of Nutfield Genealogy pulled together a nice list of articles, prompting me to write my own story of how the flu outbreak affected my family.

In 1918, 2,146 people died of Spanish Influenza in Vermont [1].  Among those unfortunates was my great-grandmother, Christine (Wilkinson) Batchelder.  Though the worst of the flu was over in November of that year [2], great-grandma Batchelder passed away at Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington, Vermont on December 7^th, at the age of 38, due to pneumonia caused by the flu [3].

The effect of her passing is illustrated in the memories of her daughter, Helen, in an autobiography that was written in 1979.

“It was near Christmas time in 1918 when the first big change took place in my life,” her story begins.  “On Dec 5^th of 1918, father received a telephone call from Burlington Hospital where mother had been taken for surgery the week before, telling him she was dying. Father caught the daily stage (which was also the mail route over the mountains) to Manchester and a train to Burlington.”[4]

Great-aunt Helen, age 8 at the time of the story, then goes on to describe the blizzard that hit their farm while their father was away.  Her older brother, the family’s housekeeper, and neighbors helped keep the farm running through the storm, clearing paths, milking cows, and keeping her and her 5 year-old brother entertained while snow piled two stories high around their house.  Helen’s next set of sentences recall a heart-breaking scene from another era.

“It was about noon on the 9^th when we heard a different noise above the wind.  Voices, a lot of them.  Nine men with three teams of horses and the snow roller had made a road for the stage mule team to bring mother’s body and coffin home.  Father was broken and bitter and could be of no comfort to us at the time.

It was nearly a week before the town could get the roads opened, so the close relatives could come for the funeral.  Also mother’s body need to be taken to Londonderry to be placed in a vault until spring.  It was a rough week for two small motherless children.  It seemed as if with mother’s death we lost everything.”[5]

70 years later, when I was a child, stories of how broken-hearted my great-grandfather had been were still being told by his children.  It was obvious what an impression the event had left on their small rural family.  The aftermath of Christine’s passing was also impactful.  After describing the funeral of her mother, Great-aunt Helen continues:

“Now the silence was broken. Everyone on mother’s side of the family wanted to help out and to split us up as a family. They wanted to take just one of us and raise us like their own. … Father seemed to come alive at the time, grabbing us and telling the relatives ‘over my dead body you split them up or take them away from me. They are all I have left of Christine, and all I have left to live for.  I am going to take care of them myself.  And I don’t want any help from any of you!’”[6]

The family did stay together, continuing to live on the farm.  Helen’s older brother Erwin (my grandfather) occasionally came home to help them out.  Their oldest brother, Lyle, was away at the time of Christine’s passing, stationed in France at the end of World War I.  He would not learn of her death until he returned home in the spring of 1919.

It’s interesting to look at my children, who have all had the flu this winter, and think how lucky they are to have access to the conveniences we all enjoy today.  Slightly less than a hundred years ago, a flu epidemic took away a wife and mother.  It took her husband two days, a train, three teams of horses and a snow roller to bring her body the distance that a car would cover in less than three hours today.  Her children, due to the society at the time, were almost taken away from their home and father.  Ultimately, though, that family’s strength was passed down by those same children to us.  Their stories of hardship and family became ingrained in me, and I can only hope to pass a part of that strength down to my own children.

[1] Sherman, Michael, “’Awful, Awful’: The Spanish Flu in Vermont, 1918-1919”, Historic Roots, volume 3, number 1 (April 1998): 12.

[2] Ibid, 16.

[3] "Vermont, Vital Records, 1760-1954," index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/XF2V-CYM : accessed 02 Feb 2013), Christine Batchelder, 1918.

[4] Helen (Batchelder) Billings, The Other Mission Field: Where the Unloved Are Loved, (Privately printed, 1979), 2.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, 3.