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:
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.
This digitally archived vintage 1915 yearbook included student nominations for Best Fusser, Class Suffragette, Class “Burns” and Class “Harriet Stowe”.
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:
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.
The Class Ballot offered clues about personalities, plus 1920s events:
[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!
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.
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.
