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.
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| 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.
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| 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
