March is Women’s History Month, and while I’m not typically fond of events that divide us humans into categories, I thought this would be a good time to write a crossover post (where my blog-writing meets my history/genealogy-educating from @time.tracing) about some women who are near and dear to my heart, even though most of them I’ve never met.
Yes, I’m talking about the women in my family tree. Women
without whom, quite literally, I wouldn’t be here. Women who came from
different parts of the country or the world, faced tremendous hardships, saw
tremendous joy, and passed on legacies of hard work, determination, love, and
faith.
I’d like to introduce you to some of those women today, not
because I expect you to feel as deeply about them as I do, not even because I
hope you’ll find them interesting, but because I hope through seeing their
stories told collectively you will think about the women in your own family
tree without whom you wouldn’t be here and will find cause to marvel at
the goodness and grace of God that has preserved your family line and mine to
the point where He chose to bring us on the scene by giving us life at this
particular time in this particular place. So how about it? Are you ready to
trace some time with me?
The woman farthest back on my family tree of whom I have a
photograph is Catherine Yeagle Kuhl, my fourth-great-grandmother. Based
on what we’ve found so far, we think she was born in 1804 in the German region
of Europe where she married and had children before immigrating to the United
States in the 1830s and having a few more children by her husband. She lived
some twenty years after immigrating but not long enough to see the tragedy that
would befall her family during the Civil War (a tragedy I wrote about in a previous post). Though we don’t know much about her, her strength in traveling half
a world away during the early 19th century can be inferred, and from
what we know of her husband, she must have had a fortitude of steel.
Moving a generation closer to present, we meet a host of
fascinating women, one of whom was Esther Radle Jones, one of my sixteen
third-great-grandmothers. Esther was born around 1827 in Pennsylvania and by
1850 was a young bride living with her husband Vasa in her in-laws’ household in
Illinois along with her sisters- and brothers-in-law. The closeness she had
with her in-laws is evident from letters written by her father-in-law to her
during the Civil War. While living in Illinois, Esther’s first two children,
both girls, died before they reached the age of three, but that was only the
beginning of the trials she would endure.
In 1864, Vasa joined the Union Army from their new home in
Ohio and would spend essentially the entirety of his military service as a
prisoner of war, being captured before even seeing battle. It would be at least
a month and a half before Esther received word from him that he had been
captured, and letters from her father-in-law in the interim reveal that she was
struggling with worry but was encouraged to lean on her faith in God. When Vasa’s
letter finally arrived, Esther read, “It is very uncertain when you will see or
hear from me. You must do business entirely independent of me,” so she was left
to raise her three surviving children on her own.
Esther would be reunited with her husband at war’s end, but
not before suffering another great loss—the death of another child, this time
an eighteen-month-old son, in early 1865. After the war, she would have another
son (my great-great-grandfather) before moving with her family to a fourth
state—West Virginia—where she would live out the rest of her days, passing on
before reaching the age of 50. By moving to West Virginia, Esther and her
family set the stage for many marriages throughout subsequent generations, all
the way down to that of my parents.
Among my eight great-great-grandmothers, the one that is
most frequently on my mind is Stella May Perry Lewis. Born around 1885
in Boone County, West Virginia, Stella was one of thirteen children and had six
children of her own after marrying at age eighteen. In 1920, seventeen years
after her marriage, she seems to disappear from the documentary record and
remains the greatest mystery in my family tree. Multiple family stories
conflict, circumstantial evidence pops up in pieces, and theories abound from
innocent to sinister but all sad.
Her date of death, cause of death, and place of burial (if
she was buried) are as yet unknown, but her photograph continues to captivate
me, and if it weren’t for her and her photo, I never would have been located by
my third-cousin, whom I quickly found to be a kindred spirit. Our
great-grandmothers, each of whom we knew, were two of Stella’s daughters, and
we’re on a mission together to find out what happened to Stella for them, for
their sons (our grandfathers), and for her. Although much about her life, and
particularly her death, is shrouded in mystery, Stella’s story reminds me that
nothing is a mystery to God. And while we may never know this side of eternity
what became of her (though not for lack of trying!), we know that she was never
hidden from the sight of God.
Of my four great-grandmothers, I was blessed to know three of them (I met the fourth, but have no memory of her), and Frances Paulette Hamrick Smith was the one I knew the longest. The second of seven children, only the middle of whom was a boy, Paulette (as most people knew her) was born in 1916 in Nicholas County, West Virginia. After the family moved to nearby Webster Springs, she spent time working/living with other families to help make ends meet, and she continued working in clothing, department, and grocery stores until she reached retirement. At eighteen she married, and she gave birth to her only child on her nineteenth birthday.
Paulette moved around a lot throughout her life, even almost moving to Australia for her husband’s job, but that plan fell through, and they moved instead to Madison where her future son-in-law lived. She ended up residing in central and southern West Virginia her whole life, where her days were characterized by hard work and a talent-filled passion for sewing and gardening. She would often whip out a new outfit for her daughter to go out in on the weekends, and she seemed happiest when she was outdoors. As she had grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who affectionately called her “Gamma,” she would travel with them into the heart of the mountains back to Webster Springs to visit her sisters and her mother who lived to be 101 (yes, you read that right, and yes, I got to meet her). Living through the Great Depression, World War II, and the loss of her father, siblings, and husband later in life, Gamma saw a lot of hardship and grief, but her spunkiness, laughter, and work ethic stayed with her to the very end until a stroke sent her to Jesus at the age of 92.
These are merely snapshots of four very full lives, lives
that touched and were touched by others in countless ways. Each woman’s existence
stands as a reminder to us of the mercy and faithfulness of God who so
graciously created each of them in His image and sustained each of them for His
glory. And yet these lives are only four among so many more that make up my
heritage, and my heritage is only one among billions more. The breadth and
depth of God’s sovereignty, creativity, and story-crafting is breathtaking, and
if it weren’t for the women, our study of His world would be a lot less
colorful.
*Henry Kuhl Photo Credit: Lila Powers, "To Make an Example of Them," Orlando, West Virginia, June 18, 2011 (http://orlandostonesoup.blogspot.com/2011/06/to-make-example-of-them.html : accessed March 3, 2021).
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