1929: Dearest Funny Baby

Kenneth — 91 years ago — wrote this note to his wife and new child when all were confined to home. He was ill, so couldn’t be in the same room with them. He “mailed” it from one end of their house to the other. Ken and Gladys, Americans, were expats in Ooty, India and their home called Braemar.

Southeast Corner of Braemar
6:25 PM, to Pamela’s Mother
N.E. Corner of Braemar

Dearest Funny Baby,

You know I’d give you anything on earth you wanted, so here’s a letter since you wanted one.

But what can I say? Except that I love you, and you already know that, and besides no letter can tell you that as my lips and arms and all can.

As to what I’m thinking, my mind has been more or less of a blank the last two days. I know you and the baby are getting along alright and that’s the most important thing, and I miss you enough without thinking a lot about you and then missing you more.

The Dr. says there is nothing wrong with my lungs and I’ve had not fever today (only had 99 degrees yesterday, which is nothing for me) so I hope to be OK tomorrow. With acres of kisses and oceans of love,

Your very own, Kenneth

[Excerpt from the historical memoir Tigers, White Gloves and Cradles, coming soon. Copyright 2020, Laurie Winslow Sargent]

One Less Crocodile

This 1926 jungle story is from the diary of Gladys Gose Pearce, a Seattle woman who lived with spouse Ken in India during the British Raj era.

Photo by Robert Zunikoff

October, 1926

Kerala, SW India

Dear Diary,

Not long after we arrived, while on our honeymoon, Ken and I were told that in a nearby temple pool was a mugger crocodile the villagers hoped we would shoot.

Early one morning we were led to the pool, where we hid in the high bank above.

There was no sign of the crocodile at that quiet scene; indeed it was hard to believe one existed. A man came to bathe and pray. He waded out into water waist deep, and when he finished his ceremonies he cupped some water in his hand to drink. Then women came to wash their clothing. They pounded their wet garments on a flat stone, dipped them repeatedly in the pool then spread their clean garments on bushes to dry. Others came to bathe their children.

As the sun grew higher in the sky, our shade diminished and our own clothes grew sticky with perspiration. The ants found us – black ants, red ones, little and big, crawling toward us and biting us if we failed to detect their advance.

At last our vigil was rewarded. A long snout and two bulging eyes rose slowly to the surface. Ken motioned me to shoot. I shook my head. He took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. The waters of the pool were threshed to a froth, and then as they subsided we saw they were stained red with the blood of the mugger.

To read more fun stories, click HERE or the Jungle Diaries tab!

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ALSO, feel free to comment with any questions or thoughts these posts provoke, and I’ll try to respond. I’d love to hear your thoughts! Let me know what country you are from, and if you also have a blog.

Laurie

[Excerpt from Tigers, White Gloves and Cradles, coming soon. Copyright 2020, Laurie Winslow Sargent]

This post is from a collection of diary entrees and letters written in the 1920s by Gladys Gose Pearce, an American expat. Her husband J. Kenneth Pearce (Ken), a logging engineer from Seattle WA, worked in British Raj India for ten years. After a jungle honeymoon touring elephant lumber camps, the couple lived in Ooty, Madras, and the Andaman Islands.

Finding Stories in Vintage Family Photos

Are you a writer? A reader? Or a history buff, curious about your ancestors? Regardless, stories intrigue you.  Here’s the first post in my series, Researching Your Own Attic Mysteries. Learn how to dig into your vintage family memorabilia to uncover stories and the personalities behind them.

I  thought of titling this post “I See Dead People”.

Not that it has anything to do with apparitions. Instead, it has to do with those Ahah! moments: when images of people in musty sepia-toned images in your attic suddenly become people who intrigue you. With a little digging, you end up seeing them in whole new light.

Take, for example, this image of my great-great-grandpa, John Martin Gose (1825-1919). My grandma’s grandpa.

IMG-8592

A year ago, this photo meant nothing to me. Even seeing his name marked on the back meant little. But now I know his story, I’m impressed with this guy!

What an adventurer he was. He traveled via covered wagon — from Missouri to California — to take part in the gold rush. He then moved back home, started a family, and brought them all on the Oregon Trail. The journey took nearly a year until they settled as as pioneers in early Walla Walla, Washington.

If that doesn’t beat all, although a farmer, he managed to raise a whole passel of young’uns who became lawyers, a judge and a doctor. All his children prized education so highly that one, my great-grandpa, made sure all his own kids –including four daughters—were university educated before 1920.

One of those girls, my Grandma Gladys, (1897-1994), was also an athlete. She scandalously swam across a lake at U-Dub in a men’s swimsuit to beat the fraternity guys, became a PE teacher in San Diego, then lived in British Raj India for seven years.

It seems that apple Gladys didn’t fall far from the family tree — adventurers begetting adventurers.

Do you now see John, in this photo, a little differently?

Naturally you’re wondering how I learned so much about him. No, I didn’t make his story up imaginatively out of whole cloth. Playing armchair detective, I combed through a combination of oral family history, online ancestry programs, photos, census records, diaries, and letters. A fuller picture of John emerged. It’s amazing, once you have online tools and documents at your fingertips, how quickly you can pull facts together about people in the past.

Old census docs contain a lot of cool details, including occupations, i.e. blacksmith or farmer. Perhaps someday your own great-grandkids will look at a census record about you, and say, “I didn’t know great-grandma was a writer!”

As an author currently writing Gladys’ biography (about her time in India), my exploration of John is more about understanding her backstory. But Gladys is a sum of DNA parts, of her parents and grandparents and their attitudes towards life. It’s nice to not only know her better but also the people who raised her.

I’ll explain more detail in future posts how to use various resources to uncover fascinating family details, which can be used in nonfiction stories, as elements of fictional characters,  or simply help you learn more about your own ancestry.

To not miss any future posts here,  subscribe to CrossConnectMedia.com (upper right of this webpage), and follow my Facebook page, (Laurie Winslow Sargent: for Parents, Writers & the Eternally Curious). I’d also love it if you’d join me on Twitter at @LaurieSargent with #MyAtticMysteries.

I’d love to know if this inspires you to drag some boxes out of your own the attic! Let me know also if you have any questions about this process of exploring old family items.

Feel free to comment with your own tips on researching family documents, to encourage us all in our fun history explorations.

Write on!

Laurie