Friday, January 12, 2024

Voice From the 1890s

Among my possessions are two things from my grandmother on my father’s side — her wedding ring and a 12-page typed manuscript about growing up in a hard-scrabble frontier family in Canada’s Huron County.

It was a difficult life. Born in the 1870s, she was the second youngest of eight kids. Her father mainly seems to have made money by selling things that he cleared from the land — logs and limestone — or that his wife and kids gathered like wild blueberries and raspberries. They did grow a few crops, and had an apple orchard, plus a few pear trees that didn’t produce. 

They also had a handful of farm animals.

She says that it was a two-mile walk to school and that many times her hands and feet “froze” in winter, but that they were fine once she was able to thaw them out. Her father sounds like a pretty uneven character who was abusive to the point that one by one all of the family members ran away, only to return for a while before disappearing once again.

When they left, they weren’t reachable even if they wanted to talk. There were no telephones yet. For my grandmother, after her own mother finally ran off, life became simply unbearable. She was expected to cook and clean the house for her father and older brothers and to stop going to school, which was her one true love.

Besides being able to see friends at school, she loved to read and write and make up stories.

When she was around 16 she finally ran away from home, taking her younger sister with her. They found another farm family where the situation was friendlier, and for the most part she finished her growing up and schooling there.

Eventually, as an older teen, she found happiness singing and dancing with other farm kids on Saturday nights until three or four in the morning, then grabbing an hour of sleep before rising to do another day’s hard work.

I had read about all of this in her manuscript before but that was soon after she died in the late 1960s, when I didn’t really appreciate it at the time. But yesterday as I reread it for the first time in many years, a new detail jumped out at me. When she was only 14 or so, my grandmother apparently wrote a book!

It must have been short and definitely was fiction, even though at the time she says she had not yet read a work of fiction by anyone else. She says her siblings loved her book and asked her to read it to them over and over. There is no indication what the story was about.

My grandmother was hardly what you’d call an intellectual. She didn’t come from a long line of literary greats, but she created stories of her own almost by instinct, I believe. It makes me wonder about the origin of fiction much further back in human societies.

Anyway, so far as I can determine, this novel of hers from 130 years ago was not preserved. It would have been written with a pencil in some sort of school notebook, which was no doubt lost somewhere along the way.

All I have now is the knowledge that it once existed. Plus the additional fact that her youngest son, my father, also wrote an unpublished novel on his own, which I discovered among his possessions after he died.

At the very least, I know I’m not the first story-teller in the family. No doubt there were many others in the distant past. And I also won’t be the last.

BTW, I also have my grandmother’s wedding ring, a simple metallic thing distinguished by a heart, given to her by David Weir, my grandfather who died two decades before I came onto the scene.

Everything else I just have to imagine. 

(I first published this last year in February.)

(Read also: Finding Dad’s Novel.)

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