Category Archives: Researching Your Own Attic Mysteries

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A Mysterious 1938 4th Grade Report Card

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This post is in the series Stories from Family Memorabilia, on researching family history, via odd objects and papers.

Today’s historical mystery is a 1938 4th Grade report card. It’s a strange report, from an odd location.

And as usual, I can’t pick up any old family paper without it stimulating my curiosity. Like Paul Harvey, the old American radio broadcaster, I want “the rest of the story.”

Despite the missing first name on this paper, I realize quickly I’m looking at my dad’s report card, since in 1938 he was 10 years old. Still, I noticed odd things about this report.

Harsh Teachers

For starters, one teacher’s comments were over-the-top insensitive. I’m not a fan of participation trophies, so mentioning he was sloppy or untidy was acceptable. But for his English teacher, H.D.H., to call him–any kid!–“lazy and unintelligent” raised my Mama hackles.

Dad as an adult was both industrious and bright, working as a creative landscape architect. So I put on my psych cap. (I formerly worked in both psychiatric and educational Occupational Therapy.) What the heck was going on with Dad at age 10?

Words from less harsh teachers described him in this report as “content with something much less than his best”, “aught to have done better”, “inclined to be erratic”, “rather mischievous”, disobedient, silly, slack, and forgetful. Ooooh, this is beginning to sound like a boy who had potential, but didn’t give a rip. But why?

Conversely, his French teacher wrote “He is keen and intelligent and well ahead for his age.” His Scripture teacher wrote “listens well and answers intelligently.” And while Dad was 10, the average age of the class was 11 years old. Hmm. I’ve worked with gifted children who misbehaved out of sheer boredom.

Children on the Move

Finally I notice the words at the top: Form: “Remove” and in the tiniest cursive imaginable at the bottom of the report, “Knowing he is leaving has unsettled him, I think.”

So Dad was leaving. To go where? And where, in the world (literally) was this school, teaching French and Latin to 4th graders?

The odds were high he had just come from another country, and soon leaving for another. You see, Dad was the son of an American foreign service officer. I have a list of dates of dates and places where Dad’s family lived.

This list below, created by one of Dad’s sisters, reveals that Dad moved four times in his first 10 years of life. Born in Winnipeg Canada, he then lived in Arlington Virginia, Trieste Italy, and Plymouth England, then later that same year to Lynchburg, VA.

List of places Don Winslow lived including Winnipeg, Canada, Trieste, Italy, and Plymouth England.
Dad was born in 1928. He lived in four countries before age ten.

Where was Ravenswood School?

The location of Ravenswood School puzzled me. In 1938 Dad lived in two places. Historical sites for Lynchburg don’t show any school by that name, yet four hours from there is the town of Ravenswood, West Virginia. Three schools there had the name Ravenswood.

I found in my ancestry app that while Dad was at Ravenswood (in January) his grandmother had died in Lynchburg.

So the Lynchburg timing was right. But wait! But why would they dump him in a school four hours away at age 10, unless it was a boarding school? They didn’t have boarding schools in WV, right?

Also unusual to me was the inclusion of Latin and French in an American 4th Grade classroom, even in 1938. The wording was weird too: “Form 4” instead of “Grade 4” with the school term was labeled “Easter.”

I called my lifeline (my brother) who said dad had been in a boarding school at some point in his life. So thinking the town of Ravenswood, WV might be a red herring, I Googled Plymouth, England. Lo and behold, there was a Ravenswood School in England, too.

Then began a deep dive for me down a dark hole for two days.

British boarding schools for 8-year olds?!

That Ravenswood was indeed a boarding school. And from the dates on the report card, I realized Dad had been there at ages 9 and 10. Possibly at even a younger age. WHAT?

Although my grandparents were American, it was particularly common for children of diplomats and others in working government service in other countries to send their children to boarding schools. The justification for it was that it would supposedly give children more stability and an excellent education.

But for some reason, I always thought this involved the teen years, not children still clutching teddy bears and wanting mom to read bedtime stories to them.

Then I found the website Boarding School Survivors: Therapeutic help for those affected by boarding, created by Nick Duffell, also author of the book The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System.

I was shocked to finally understand one of the lines in tiny print at the bottom of Dad’s report card: “too many stripes for silly behavior and disobedience.” That meant beatings with a cane. I was also distressed reading about how much bullying and even more extreme abuse took place within early boarding schools, meted out by older children.

Dad, born in February, at the time of this report card was only 10 years and 1 month old, so the report was mostly about his behavior at age 9.

Boarding school documentaries reveal harsh truths

I then watched two documentaries on YouTube showing 8 year olds being sent off to boarding school in more recent years. I was disturbed by how it distressed those particularly young children. Leaving Home At Eight | Boarding School Children follows four little girls, and The Making of Them (1994) (also connected with Nick Duffell) several 8 and 9-year-old boys.

Listening to one little boy in the latter documentary broke my heart. He had quickly learned to shut down his emotions and be a brave little man. Boys who cried for their mothers were particularly targeted for bullying.

Strangely, those two modern documentaries revealed distress in some of the mothers who felt pressured to send their kids to boarding schools. They were truly persuaded it would be good for them. Some believed it would give their children more stability, what with the family moving often with Dad’s work. Many of these women had husbands who had been in boarding schools themselves, so for the fathers that was all they knew.

I urge you to watch those documentaries, but with a tissue handy.

Raising resilient kids at on the move

This deep dive has me appreciating the permission I always had, being an American, to educate my children in a variety of ways and even when moving to new locations. As a child, I moved every three years: Dad had apparently caught the moving bug.

I feel that caused growth in me as child and helped me to learn to adapt well. My husband and I while raising our three children lived in three different U.S. states and one other country (Norway.) Of course, it was not always easy for the kids changing schools. But they all grew into adults who love to travel.

Educationally, depending on each of my own child’s individual needs, we used a variety of methods. Our children experienced a mix of public school (including in Norway) and home school–depending on each one’s individual needs at the time–growing up to be brilliant and loving adults now teaching their own children to explore.

Fresh understanding

Now I know more than I wanted to know from a single piece of paper from my vintage paper pile. But it’s got me thinking about my dad and how it may have affected him.

It also has given me more insight into my Grandmother’s writings about living in British Raj, India. She had commented with some horror on young children being sent away from India to England to boarding schools, while both parents remained in India. Once they were shipped off, some children didn’t see their parents for years. Grandma had come from an extremely tight and loving family, so this shook her.

I want to weep for all the precious moments British moms missed (as did my Dad’s American mom) with their children in boarding school. Some of you know I wrote a book called Delight in Your Child’s Design (Second Edition, Kindle) so know my passion for that. I can only hope that those moms now know there are ways to educate children well, while keeping them close.

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1848: An Abolitionist Bill for Secession

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Little-known History ~ Abolitionist voters in Massachusetts, 17 years before the 13th amendment, proposed a bill: denounce slavery or secede from the Union.

When I found this document accidentally during a family ancestry search, I felt heartened. In these days of racial discord, it’s nice to see evidence of people who always thought slavery a horror and fought hard to destroy it. I’d never heard before of any bills proposing a state secede unless slavery was abolished, have you?

Sadly, the bill did not pass. Yet it inspires me to see seven names connected with my family tree (Nickerson, Doane, and Robbins). Grandpa’s middle name was Robbins; his mother’s parents were Robbins and Nickerson. Perhaps some of your own ancestors are in this list of signers.

I know we can just as easily find dark histories buried in our family trees, but we can at least be proud of these brave people who signed this in 1848. And surely to get to the point of creating a bill, they must have been fighting slavery long before.

Taking a closer look in the document itself, with eight parts, I-VIII, we see slavery declared:

“a covenant with the death, and an agreement with hell”.

The proposed bill decried that as long as the Commonwealth consented to slavery, the government would be “morally and politically responsible for all the cruelties and horrors of the slave system.” The bill also requested, in near-poetic and faith-filled words:

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Calculating Characters in Family History

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In writing history – family history or a historical biography— using a little math humanizes characters so we can see them as former living, breathing human beings.

An ancestry chart can provide nuts and bolts about people: birth dates, death dates, marriage dates.  But how can those dates tell a story?

While researching one interesting true character in my own tree for a history magazine article, I learned the following about a guy named John. Read (but feel free to skim) this next paragraph. I guarantee it’s boring, but a fresher approach follows:

John Martin Gose (1825-1919) married Hannah Jane McQuown (1831-1925) in 1854. They moved from Missouri to the Washington Territory in 1864 with five children, Thomas Phelps (b. 1855), Dora (b. 1856), Mack (b.1859), John (b. 1861) and Christopher (b.1863). They arrived in Walla Walla in 1865. A sixth child, Oscar (b. 1865 or 1866) was born there.

With no additional information other than those dates and locations, can we discern more about what this family was like and make their story more interesting?

1 calculator + 1 family tree = more compelling stories.

Doing a little math with the dates provided, this picture emerges:

24-year-old John and his wife Hannah, 22, began their year-long journey on the Oregon Trail with five children all under ten years old. In their covered wagon were Phelps (9), Dora (8), Mack (5), John (3) and Christopher, a nursing baby. After arrival in Walla Walla, Hannah had another child, Oscar — she’d been expecting him either during the during the arduous journey or shortly after arriving in the new settlement. Years later, when the children were teens, tragedy struck. To the devastation of John, Hannah, and the siblings, Oscar died when he was only 12 years old. 

Although I was able to confirm that yes, they traveled the Oregon Trail, dates and locations alone strongly suggested that initially. All other details in the previous paragraph came from my simply subtracting birth dates from death dates, then imagining what that must have been like for them. Who knew math could tell a story?

Does this give you an impulse to look at your own ancestral tree in a new way? Eager to find stories about your own family history? Whip out your calculator too! Let me know what stories you discover.

If you think that’s a fun way to learn about your ancestors, you may like this post, too: A 1915 Yearbook Shows Teen Life 105 Years Ago

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A 1915 Yearbook Shows Teen Life 105 Years Ago

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This digitally archived vintage 1915 yearbook included student nominations for Best Fusser, Class Suffragette, Class “Burns” and Class “Harriet Stowe”.

1915 WaHi yearbook photo and course descriptions for Gladys Gose at Walla Walla High.

What great fun it is, reading my grandparents’ 1915 WaHi yearbook, from Walla Walla High in Washington State. It’s like peeking through a window into their teenage personalities!

I found the digital copy, via Google Search. Yearbooks back then were cleverly written (this one, by the Junior Class) with much detail about their classmates. That high school year, with fewer than 70 Seniors, there was room in the yearbook to playfully describe each graduating student in numerous entries.

Included was “An Ode to 1915”, a long poem with stanzas for each student. What a kick it was for me to find these, about the teen versions of my Grandma Gladys and Grandpa Ken:

My! But Gladys was gymnastic, can speak for election;

And that car they call a “Ford,” she drives it to perfection;

She went on an English picnic once and now her friends recall

That in trying to cross the river—she from a log did fall.

I can easily imagine athletic Gladys trying to cross a river on a log. As for her Ford, it was most likely a Model T. And she did love to talk!

I also found a stanza about Ken:

There is a boy in our class whom we are proud to claim;

He is very studious—Kenneth Pierce is his name.

He’s won fame in speaking and (perhaps you don’t know it),

But he is quite famous in the role of a poet.

Ken’s last name was misspelled Pierce (vs. Pearce) by his classmate. But it was Grandpa, for certain – the only Kenneth in his graduating class. Other places in the yearbook mention Ken’s love for poetry and further display his and Gladys’s personalities:

Each student was assigned a personal motto:

It was fun to see that Gladys’s was: “No wild enthusiast ever yet could resist”.

That certainly fits a girl who would later hop a steamship to India!  I knew that Grandma played basketball, but it was revealing to see she was involved in drama, speaking, singing, speaking competitions, and organizing social events.

The motto assigned to Ken was: “Night after night, he sat and bleared his eyes with books.”

He definitely was a studious one, graduating that year from high school at only age 16. He played the violin, and in the school’s “House of Representatives” loved leadership and debate. (Later at the young age of 25, he’d be put in a role of leadership in India.)

But as you’ll see, he was also very playful.

Quick aside: I originally sought out this yearbook to see Ken’s high school graduation picture. That’s because Gladys, in a letter written ten years later, wrote that the boy she once knew had filled out as a man, and had “a very fine mustache”.

It’s easy to see his little-boy looks in his high school photo at age 16:

1915 WaHi yearbook photo, Kenneth Pearce, Walla Walla High.

Here’s a different picture showing what he looked like nearly ten years later, when she fell in love with him. (I found this one among family photos.) I couldn’t figure out why they were “just friends” for so many years. He certainly did grow up after high school.

J. Kenneth Pearce photo, late 1920s. Pearce Family Collection, Laurie Winslow Sargent

The Class Ballot offered clues about personalities, plus 1920s events:

Class Ballot from the 1915 Wa-Hi yearbook, published in 1916. Includes student nominations for Best Fusser, Class Suffragette, Class “Burns” and Class “Harriet Stowe”.
[Class Ballot: from the 1915 Wa-Hi yearbook, published in 1916.]

It’s interesting that there were nominations for such things as Class Suffragette (women still did not have the right to vote) and Class “Harriet Stowe”. I assume the latter referred to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and that this classmate a vocal abolitionist.

As for “Class Pigmy”, “Noisiest Girl”, or “Lightest-headed Girl” — those weren’t terrifically flattering. Other girls were probably OK with “Jolliest Girl” and “Class Zoologist”.

“Best Fusser” for Gladys mystifies me, only because I can’t figure out what the word meant back then, in this context. The common dictionary definition of a “fusser” is someone overly concerned with details. It does seem from other entrees in the yearbook that Gladys was a busy-bee. Perhaps she loved overseeing details in her role on the Student Entertainment Committee.

I see Grandpa Ken (last name spelled Pierce again) voted “Class ‘Burns'” as in the famed Scottish poet, Robert Burns. Sure enough, in some of  Ken’s later love letters to Grandma, he quoting Burns’ love poetry!

The 1915 yearbook also included fictional stories and predictions

One fiction story in the book was ‘On the Little Pend o’Reille’” by Kenneth Pearce, in which Ken wrote about a dramatic cougar attack. (I’ll put it in another blog post later, as it’s quite exciting.)

Another student writer, Lois Porter, wrote predictions of the future for each student, based on their personalities. It was a bit like the “Most Likely To…” lists you see in modern yearbooks, but with a playful twist. She began it:

In the city of Walla Walla, by the city of Milton, by the city of Dixie, lived a people wise and courageous, brave and athletic, the tribe of the Seniors, the children of the Walla Wallans; and their abode was Walla Walla High School.

Lois Porter, 1915 WaHi Yearbook

About Gladys, she wrote: “Thou, O Gladys Gose, shalt mighty waters cross. In a strange language with strange people and in strange lands shalt thy voice rise in anthems of glad tidings.”

I suspect that teen Gladys must have talked of wanting to travel. It would be eight years before she actually crossed any “mighty waters to strange lands”.

Here was Ken’s:

“Thou, O Myrl Higgins, O Lucy Magallon, O Kenneth Pierce, O Winnie Griffith, and thou, too, O Harold Hayden, shall cast thy lot together and members of the Kalem Company shalt thou become. Exciting and romantic shall be thy future…”

The Kalem Company was an early American silent film studio founded in NY City in 1907.

Indeed, Grandpa enjoyed drama. In the Senior Play, Manoeuvers of Jane, he played Prebendery Bostock. (Gladys played Constantia Gage.) A decade later, Ken would write Gladys from his ship to India that he’d dressed up as a flapper for a masquerade party, to the horror of the missionaries onboard (and now to my amusement)!

After Gladys joined him, they would act in the play The Importance of Being Earnest to entertain a small group of British friends. (During the Raj era, acting in plays was a common way for expats to make their own entertainment). However, Ken’s future work would be as a logging engineer—a bit  more sedate than work as a silent film actor.

Slang and Sports

Some slang in the yearbook was unique to that era:

“… we are not “digs”, for we manage to have a good time wherever we go. If we do not get it in the study hall with paper wads, we get it in the gymnasium at parties and dances.”

But any athletic teen today can relate to excitement over sporting events, including a basketball game (in which I proudly say Gladys played Center):

“A great deal of enthusiasm had been worked up and many guesses were made as to the winners of the girls’ and boys’ inter-class basketball series. The girls’ games were played first, starting Wednesday, December 2. On this date, the seats in the gymnasium were crowded to the limit and everywhere class spirit was shown by the yelling and shouting of the class rooters.”

There’s so much more I discovered in this yearbook. I’ll summarize by saying the yearbook naturally included courses of study (many though, I didn’t expect to see in a 1915 high school) and photos of athletes in 1915 sports attire and in various clubs. The yearbook also included ads from local businesses (1920s prices, of course) cartoons, and jokes. I spent hours poking through the yearbook — more entertaining for me that the average Netflix movie and certainly more fun that reading current pandemic news.

A good end note to this post is the Last Will and Testament of the Senior Class, where items were ‘willed to’ the Juniors. That included ”the new swinging locker doors with which to dent your skulls,” and “the nerve racking game of Town Ball,” another version of baseball.

As a writer my urge to correct that spelling of nerve-wracking is overwhelming, but I do resist editing words written by teens 105 years ago.

To read the 1915 yearbook in full, click here: WA-HI Yearbook — have fun looking at the ads, too: you could buy a new Ford for only $440.

Fellow writers or genealogy fans: you may have as much fun researching your own family members’ vintage yearbooks. Leave a comment with any questions or tell me what you discover!