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Sunday, January 1, 2017

My Genealogical Dollhouse

All this has happened before. And it will all happen again. But this time it happened to Wendy, John, and Michael Darling.
                                              -Walt Disney’s story of Peter Pan

My daughter was born in 2003, just after genealogical resources began appearing online and making family research much easier — easier, that is, for people without an infant or toddler in their care.


My own research was put on hold for several years, yet becoming a mother had made the research that much more relevant. I had added a new generation to my family tree, and I felt I could better connect to the generations of mothers before me. When I read lines like the ones above in my daughter’s favorite books, they resonated in a new way. When she started school and I had time to indulge in my dead relatives again (my favorite kind, according to my brother), online resources like Ancestry and Find A Grave had exploded (the U.S. census was fully digitized in 2006), and I could access documents and primary sources without having to leave my home. But I was merely picking up on a journey that had started back in the 1970s.

In 1977, my parents took my brother and me on a cross-country road trip. We flew from San Francisco to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and picked up a new car, then followed a circuitous route that took us to Washington D.C. and back across the country to our home outside of Sacramento.

My father’s mother, Mattie Lee Ames Luce McCanne, lived in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, in a small town called Perryopolis, 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. Her home was one of our stops.

Fayette County, PA. Image courtesy of www.pafirefighters.com.
My grandfather, Paul Olin Luce, had died several years earlier, and it would be several more years before Mattie Lee moved back to her home state of Arkansas. I was the only granddaughter until 1986, and even though I was only 13 in 1977, Mattie Lee was ready to trust me with some heirlooms. As we were leaving her house, she hurried back into the garage and brought out a few boxes that she pushed into the car next to me. It would be a decade or more before I explored the contents, but when I did open the boxes, I found a small corner of the late nineteenth-century Pennsylvania countryside, filled with farmers and carpenters and their wives and children, most of whom were related to me.

Of course, that scene didn’t appear automatically. It took years of research to put the puzzle together, and this was in the 1980s and 1990s, long before anything was available online. It required trips to the small San Francisco genealogy library that was only open several days a week for limited hours (most of which did not correspond with a college or work schedule) and visits to the Oakland California LDS Temple, where rolls of microfilm were stored in the basement and which was the only local option for finding census information at the time. It also required a trip back to Perryopolis, to wander through the cemeteries looking for names and connections, and hours in the Uniontown Court House, where I found wills and other documents.

But the most precious papers I have couldn’t be found in the usual places. The only reason I have them is because my great-grandmother Sara “Sadie” Blair Luce Bryson saved them, and then Mattie Lee, Sadie’s daughter-in-law saved them. These are letters to and from Sadie, her brother Sam, and her sister Carrie, written in the springs of 1892 and 1893, when first Sam, and then Carrie, were away from home at school.

Letter from Sadie to Sam, April 1892
Sadie and Mattie Lee also saved an old photo album filled with pictures of the family, many of which (not all) were identified, so I was able to put faces to the names, and fill the Fayette County countryside with fully imagined people to people my own little genealogical dollhouse.

Here is that family: parents Olin Sutton (“O.S.”) and Josephine and children Carrie, Sam, Sadie, Sutton, Martha, and Earl.

In 1892, the year the first letters were written, Fayette County was in the midst of a population explosion fueled by the coal and coke industry. Immigrants from eastern and southern Europe and former enslaved people from the South changed the makeup of what had been a bucolic farming community settled by German and Scottish immigrants in the early nineteenth century. My Blair family was straddling this shift. The father of the family, O.S. Blair, had transitioned from building barns to building mine shafts, and ten years later, in 1902, he would become the assistant superintendent of the Washington Coal & Coke Company, leaving his family’s rural roots behind.

The letters I have were written right before these changes took place. Although O.S. Blair had not yet attained the professional and economic success that he’d see in the next decade, he was still able to send two of his children to college. Samuel Gallatin Blair, the oldest son, was at a “normal school” — what would become known as a teacher’s college. A year later, the oldest child, Carrie, went to study music at Grove City College, 90 miles from home. Sam’s letters are playful and engaging, revealing a loving and fun relationship with his younger siblings Sadie, Sutton, and Martha. Carrie’s are more serious, focusing on her experiences as a new college student, but like Sam’s, her words illustrate a deep attachment to her family and home.

These words, more than the primary sources or histories or even photos, offer a peek into their lives, a window through which I can look back into 1892 Pennsylvania and see my little doll family going through their daily lives — at work, at play, and at school — before and after personal tragedies that would reshape their lives, constantly forcing the family to regroup and move on, just as each new generation does.

Sources:



© Kristin Luce, 2017


1 comment:

  1. Kristen,
    I love the title of your blog and the picture you have painted with your words of "peeking in to the dollhouse"of your relatives. What a treasure!

    ReplyDelete