Stories. They inform the world around us. They tell us of our past. They help us to envision our future.
One important page in the story of my family's past was written at Newgate Prison in London in the mid-1700's. No, none of my ancestors were inmates. My many-greats grandfather was chaplain there. His first wife had died, so he married again. It was the common lot in that day and age to need a help-meet to carry the heavy and busy burden of family life; and it was not unusual for people, especially those with children, to re-marry quickly as possible when widowed.
But the second wife was a hard woman, and she was cruel to her stepson whom, it appears, she beat frequently. The child was expected to do all manner of chores and errands. One day when the second wife ran short of yeast for bread-making, she sent the boy with a small pottery vessel to fetch more yeast. No matter what the reason for his clumsiness (perhaps he was hurrying or tired or both), he fell on the way home and the yeast pot shattered.
The boy was weeping and distraught, too terrified to go home to face his stepmother, when a miracle opened up for him: his uncle (brother of his late mother), home on a visit from the American Colonies, came riding by on a horse. He recognized the child immediately, and he asked what grieved him so. The boy unburdened his heart to his uncle, whereupon he was swept up onto the horse with him and they rode away. The uncle, without ever seeing his brother-in-law or explaining what he was doing, took the boy back across the ocean with him. The family never learned what had happened to the boy. And the connection to the Old World was severed with the breaking of the yeast pot.
The uncle lived, according to a few lines written in an old family Bible (from which I have seen only copied pages), "in the Carolinas" where he had a large farm. The boy grew up to be a young man who had a farm of his own, and he married "a small dark woman." Then came the start of the American Revolution. The young man joined up on the side of the Colonists--his neighbors and his new home--but he was taken prisoner and, while held captive, was persuaded to join the Redcoats. He fought for the remainder of the war on the side of the British.
When the fighting was done and the treaties were signed, he tried to return home but, of course, a turncoat could never expect to regain the esteem of those he had betrayed. There could be no peace between them. My ancestor and his wife threw the family silver into a nearby river and escaped in the night, running far to the north where, in recognition of his military service to the King, he had been offered a crown grant of land in Nova Scotia. It took a long, long time for the couple to become accustomed to the strange wild and uninhabited land where they found themselves and they never quite ceased grieving the comforts of their lost Carolina home. Indeed, generations later, my great-grandmother was named Caroline in remembrance of the past.
Descendants were few. It seems that only one sibling in each generation elected to marry and have children; no one knows quite why. It is another family mystery: the tale I was told by my mother (one that we often wondered at and had opinions regarding) is that the family members were, for unknown reasons, strongly discouraged from marrying and carrying on the line. As a result, there tended to be several bachelor uncles and a handful of old maids in each generation. (Indeed, my great-grandmother Caroline herself did not marry until she was past the age of 40 and she married only then because, quite against the morality of her time and her station, she found herself with child. If not for her indiscretion, the family would surely have died out.)
They were a family of readers and thinkers. Their love of knowledge has come down in the blood to me, and so has a book from one of those unmarried Nova Scotia uncles. He subscribed to The Golden Argosy in the year 1887; and he admired the publication so much that he had the issues bound into a volume to keep always.
Perhaps it is fate (or maybe only justly fair) that I am now the keeper of the book since I am one of this generation's leftovers--an unclaimed old auntie, if you will.
I do not know if the stories have been published elsewhere online; perhaps they have. Some of the authors were famous men. No infringement of any sort is intended.
I do not believe that this material can possibly be under copyright any longer, not after the passage of nearly 130 years.
But I think it's good to share, so that is what I hope to do, here in this blog, a little at a time, that others might read and that these stories might not be lost.
.....We shall begin soon.
