IN PRAISE OF WOMEN              

(This would have made a great blog for Mother’s Day,but I wasn't blogging then. Maybe next year.)

Spring has sprung as they say.  Summer began on June 21^st.  We are in the warm section of our  calendar year.  We live inside our air-conditioned houses, we run for our air-conditioned cars, we shop in air-conditioned malls with big icy drinks in our hands.  With modern technology we have made a comfortable world for ourselves during the hot months of summer.

But as I work on my genealogy, I see the faces of the past.  I see various pictures of my women ancestors.  They look out at me from a sepia-toned world.  They could all be twins they look so much alike.  Of course your pictures could be different perhaps, of sophisticated town-dwelling women, well dressed, ensconced in city houses, waited on by servants.  Fresh looking, cool looking, nice looking. 

These are NOT my women.

Mary Elizabeth

My women live in small rural towns, or on the frontier backwoods, or on red dirt farms throughout the south.  They live in little wooden cabins, or perhaps later in wood clapboard farmhouses  There was probably a large brick chimney at either end of the house.  Ah, you say.  That will keep them warm in the winter.  But, I say, think about what it will do for them in the SUMMER!   In earlier times that chimney was where they cooked.  There would be a large pot hanging over the fire with a chicken stewing, or perhaps turnip greens simmering with salted pork.  There would be large black-iron skillets sitting in the hot ash, full of baking biscuits or cornbread made with freshly ground corn.  Maybe there would be a large skillet full of frying pork chops.  There would be wonderful smells emanating from that kitchen – but think of the Heat!  And there was no avoiding it.  Bread had to be baked every single day.  The family had to be fed along with any farmhands present at any given time.  There was nowhere to send for carryout! 

Later on there probably would have been a “new-fangled” wood stove in that kitchen.  Perhaps

it was better to get the food up off the floor, better on backs and arms.  Better not to get your long skirt caught on fire or your baby falling in.  But that stove had a wood fire, just the same, just as hot, with the smoke funneled up a stovepipe and out a flue in the wall, exuding heat as it went.  

These women were enduring all this heat with so many layers of clothes on that I feel like fainting just thinking about it.  They themselves or someone close by probably wove the cloth they used for clothing.  Oh yes, they made all the clothes they wore, their children wore, and their men wore.  How would you like to be faced with the prospect of having a piece of valuable material in front of you and knowing you had to make your husband a pair of trousers!  The fabric was valuable not because of what it was made of, but rather because of how much effort had gone into procuring the cotton, or flax, or wool, or leather, or whatever else they had to work with.  The crop had to be produced, or the animals maintained.  The fiber had to be cleaned, spun on a wheel into thread, and woven on a loom; or the leather had to be procured, tanned, and prepared for use.  When you read the inventory lists of old estates, almost every home had a spinning wheel and/or a loom.  If you didn’t, then a relative or a nearby neighbor (read possibly 10 miles) did and you could barter with them for some material.

Mary Margaret

To be proper a women had to be well covered, from head to toe.  Thus there were under garments, corsets, shifts, petticoats, scarfs or bonnets tied under the chin.  They wouldn’t have worn corsets regularly, but if they dressed for “going out” (their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes) there would have been corsets.  They were needed to pull in the tiny waists so desired then.  Then there were the heavy duty shoes and stockings which were more like our socks.  No sandals for these ladies and no going bare legged.

While wearing all these clothes they were also out in their garden growing all the food the family would eat.  While the husband and older boys were working the farm, growing the grain to feed the animals, growing the corn and wheat for the bread they ate, growing the cash crop which they sold for money to buy the things  they couldn’t grow like coffee and sugar, the women were in charge of what  today  would be called the kitchen garden.  But it would not be the small neat squares we are used to; it would be a plot of land like a small farm in itself.  There would be arbors with apples and pears and grapes.  There would be nut trees with walnuts and pecans. She and any available children were responsible for all the food that would keep the family alive and then preserving all they could to get them through the winter.  In that era winters were harsher with more snow than now.  There were no crops growing.  If they had no food, they starved.  They preserved what they could by drying, canning, salting, sugaring, or storing in the root cellar.  There is a story in the FOXFIRE books* about “Leather britches beans.”  They strung greenbeans on a string and hung them across the rafters until they were completely dry and then put them in sacks to save through the winter.  Of course they would be dry and probably tough, and would require lots of boiling.  But they had greenbeans on a cold snowy January day

If there were no older children yet, and no way to pay a farmhand, the woman would be out in the field with her husband some of the time, helping him:  leading the mule, directing the plow, sprinkling seeds in the

Addie

furrows behind the plow, bringing him water or his lunch.

And then, there were the animals.  There were chickens to feed, eggs to gather, droppings to be collected for fertilizer.  There were pigs further away from the house in their pen, who needed to be slopped (fed with the house food garbage, grains and corn.)  Or perhaps they were loose to forage in the woods for roots and acorns.  There was the cow to feed and milk, butter and cheese to be made.  At certain times, any of these animals might have to be slaughtered and the meat preserved and the fat rendered and stored as lard to use for cooking.

Are you tired yet!  Well there’s more.  There were the CHILDREN.  Always the children, child after child, after child!  Imagine this:  This woman is doing all the work noted above while she is pregnant!  She had to have been pregnant most of the time.  After all usually there was a child every 1½ to 2 years apart for years and years, and years - until there might be 12 to 15 or more children.  I have one family who had 21 children by the same wife!  These women were baby machines, producing the labor needed on that farm.  Sometimes they might have had some help.  Sometimes the widowed mother or mother-in-law lived in the home, often a spinster aunt, but not always.  Sometimes you see a strange person on a census with a different name, a young girl, who could be a relative who needed to be taken in, or who may have come purposely to help with the children and the household for her room and board.  If you see that, express a sigh of relief for the poor exhausted woman of that house.

Susan

The fresh-faced farm girls who became those harried farm wives must have been pretty once.  After all they were so young, usually between 13 and 18 years old when they married.  Of course, they would have worked in their own homes, they knew the hard work. They had always done hard work.  But now they had it all by themselves, taking care of their own entire house and farm and family.  They became the gaunt, exhausted, hollowed eyed, wornout women we see in the photos.  They probably wouldn’t have thought they deserved our pity.  After all what they did was what every woman did.  It was just the way it was.  It was their normal.

So let’s don’t pity them!  Let’s give them the honor they deserve.  Let’s look at those photos and see strong, courageous, capable women, keeping their homes, raising their food, caring for their children, supporting their men, and living their lives with honor.

They deserve PRAISE.  I give it to them.

*FOXFIRE BOOKS: (Edited by Eliot Wigginton. Published by Anchor Press, the first editions in 1972, 1973 and 1975)  In the early 1970s a high school in Rabun Gap, Georgia, right in the heart of the high mountain counties of Macon (NC) Habersham and Rabun (SC) decided that all the mountain lore of that region, all the knowledge of how to exist in that extreme environment, which was stored in the brains of the old inhabitants of that land, needed to be captured before they were all gone.  And the current young people needed to know what had gone before them.  So for years, they assigned the students the job of interviewing those old mountain people, starting out with their own families.  They went up into the hills searching out what people knew and writing it down.  Sometimes they used audio media to capture the sound of these folks telling their own stories.  Eventually there were 12 books.  It is a marvelous set of books, stories about the ones who came before us.  You might find one in your library.  I see them still available on EBay and Amazon.

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Exciting things happening in my little Genealogy world.  Still "blogging" away.   In future writings I will ponder the mysteries we all pursue in research, meander through my mind where whispers of long passed relatives reach out to me, and get down to the "nitty-gritty" hard work involved in this endeavor called GENEALOGY.  Hope you find it interesting and come back to me if you have comments on these subjects or find some connection in my family lines.  See My Family Lines tab at the top.

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We have a genealogy forum every Tuesday in Belmont, NC.  If you live nearby, come join us from 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., at the J.Paul Ford Recreation Center at 37 E. Woodrow Ave.  Right now, once a month our meeting is devoted to learning to make short personal videos to be inserted into family trees, facebook postings, blogs, YouTube, etc. Our resident guru Jim Antley is teaching us loads of new talents.  During other meetings we explore all aspects of genealogy research including storage possibilities, story telling/sharing, genealogy technology, brickwall help, etc .    Find us at:  http://belmontgenealogyclub.blogspot.com/.  Of course, when a member in the group needs help, or if someone new comes along with a problem, a "brickwall" or such, we drop what we are doing and all jump in  to explore with them.  Lots of fun!

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There is also a new Genealogy Group formed in Gastonia, NC.  They meet the first Thursday of the month in the NC History Room, second floor, at the main Gaston Public Library on Garrison Street in Gastonia.  Meeting time 7:00 - 8:30.  Linda Klocker who has had previous groups in Belmont and in Mountain Island Lake will be leading this new venture.  Whether you are a beginner or an experienced searcher, come meet the group.

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Were you chosen to receive the new thing at Ancestry.com?  They have offered to some of their customers, as a test, their new "story" feature.  When you are researching, and have pulled up a family data sheet on a person, up by where you can "edit" the person, it offers you a "STORY" button.  Ancestry then puts all the information into a story line containing all your documents.  To read more about this, click on this link from Ancestry Insider.  http://ancestryinsider.blogspot.com/2013/06/ancestrycom-new-story-view.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AncestryInsider+%28The+Ancestry+Insider%29