Great-great
Aunt Lydia, who passed down her “Genealogy of the Powells” to future
generations, is a kind of role model for me.
When you’re spending all your spare time surfing ancestry.com and
tracking down cemeteries and blogging not knowing if anyone is reading, you
sometimes wonder if what you leave behind will mean anything to anybody. Aunt Lydia, who wrote something that helped
me in my search 135 years later, gives me hope that what I’m doing will mean
something to future generations.
Lydia
Caroline was born 16 January 1849 in Tennessee, the next-to-youngest child of
Benjamin and Eliza Helen (Fowler) Powell.
In Lydia’s own words, “I was named for the wife of my uncle James E.
Fowler of near Paris, Tenn.; she was Caroline Harris, a sister of the late
Senator Isham G. Harris of Tennessee.
Lydia is for his sister-in-law, Mrs. Lydia Harris.”
 |
| 1860 Shelby County, TN census Lydia is listed as Martha L.C. Powell |
Lydia didn’t
marry until she was 33—to a 57-year-old man, Elisha Ray, who had been widowed
twice. She apparently used her spinsterhood
to good advantage, traveling and writing stories about her adventures for the
hometown newspaper. She carried her
writing implements, silver inkwell, and paper in a shagreen (sharkskin) box
with gilt trim. She visited a spa in Hot
Springs, Arkansas, where she took an oxypathor treatment that she claimed made
her look 10 years younger. (Google it;
it’s really interesting.) She visited a
home in Florida that she described as “decorated like a Turkish bashaw’s.” She visited Wales, where she bought a
washstand, highboy, wardrobe, and bed made of mahogany with carved roses and
angels, that she left to Aunt Clara in her will. (Uncle Angus refused to take possession of
them, as it would have required that he hire a wagon to fetch them.) My cousin owns two pictures that Lydia
painted—one of a swamp in Florida and one of sheep in Wales.
Lydia
married Elisha Boykin Ray on 10 May 1882.
He had been married previously to Mary Susan Lake, who died in 1864, and
Ann Rebecca Wright, who died in 1872. Years
ago, my cousin showed me a photograph of Elisha Ray with Lydia (she thought)
and his two young children. She seemed
to remember that Elisha had a boy and a girl from his previous marriage, and
that the boy had died young. I posted
the photo on ancestry.com and then received a message from a Wright researcher
who found the photo through a search for Elijah Ray, who had married her great-grandfather’s
sister, Ann Rebecca Wright. According to
her, Elisha had at least five children with his first wife; he and Rebecca never
had children, but she helped him raise the children from his first
marriage. His children, the youngest of
whom was born in 1862, would have been grown when he and Lydia married in 1882. The woman I corresponded with feels that the
following photograph depicts Elijah with her ancestor, Rebecca Wright, and two
of his young children. I hold out the
hope that it is somehow Lydia, since I have no other picture of her.
After I had
begun to research the Powells and the Fowlers, I found a book in the
library of the Oklahoma Historical Society called Annals of the Fowler
Family (more about it in the next post.)
It was published in 1901, and the author, Glenn Dora Arthur, had corresponded
with many of her Fowler cousins, trying to document as many Fowler descendants
as she could. Two of her correspondents
were Lydia and Eliza Helen, Lydia’s mother.
Lydia really comes to life in the long and chatty letter that she sent
to Mrs. Arthur.
She
addresses Mrs. Arthur as “My Dear Relative,” and then goes on to relate
interesting stories of Fowler relatives during the Revolutionary War and the
Civil War, such as this one about Rahab Cooper, wife of Godfrey Fowler, my 5th
great-grandmother:
“She and her children were in the
kitchen and she was spinning, when, just as she was drawing out a thread, she
glanced up the road and saw the British coming; she hastily raised the trapdoor and
bade all the children enter the cellar and keep wonderfully quiet; she then
took her babe—my grandfather—and went up in the attic. The English soldiers entered the home and she
could hear them laughing about chasing all the women and children away. They remained only long enough to eat up a
lot of roasted potatoes and drink all the brandy in the house. They then left
without discovering either hiding place,”
and this
poignant anecdote, maybe not as historically significant, but just as revealing
of the times:
“There is a sad romance about the
eldest daughter of great-uncle Bullard Fowler; her name was Tillitha. She never married, although she was engaged
three times, but all three terminated disastrously. In the first instance her intended was thrown
by his horse and killed while he was on his way to wed her; the next one
sickened and died near the wedding-day; the third went to Holly Springs on
business just prior to his marriage, and he died there among strangers. She had
suitors afterwards , but she never promised to marry anyone again.”
Mrs. Arthur
makes this very Victorian response to Lydia’s letter:
“Some women
have a decided fondness for family reminiscences, and I judge that Mrs. Ray has
inherited this interesting trait from her very interesting mother, whose letter
set me on my quest for ‘our ancestors.’ Women, as a rule, have more time for
remembering traits and incidents of different members of the related families.
They talk them over as they mingle in the home work; and on rainy days and
winter nights something of the dear past is suggested by the snatch of a song,
the odor of a flower, or the similarity of the weather, when one begins,--‘It
was just such a night as then when’—and immediately everyone listens.”
I would
greatly admire Mrs. Arthur as well for her helpful contribution to Fowler
history were it not for her occasional cattiness. I can’t quite forgive her for the unnecessary
comment she made about Lydia’s explanation of the origin of her name:
“If there
are any discrepancies in these facts I am unable to correct them, as I give
them just as they have been given to me.
As a rule women are more prone than men to draw on their imagination
when their stock of facts is exhausted, but I have requested facts only in
every instance.”
As a
genealogist, I can certainly appreciate Mrs. Arthur’s devotion to the facts,
but unless our ancestors come to life for us, what is the point of names and
dates? Lydia may have had imagination,
but I’m so glad she did, or I would never have heard such interesting stories
about my Powell and Fowler ancestors.
No comments:
Post a Comment