Little-known History ~ Abolitionist voters in Massachusetts, 17 years before the 13th amendment, proposed a bill: denounce slavery or secede from the Union.
When I found this document accidentally during a family ancestry search, I felt heartened. In these days of racial discord, it’s nice to see evidence of people who always thought slavery a horror and fought hard to destroy it. I’d never heard before of any bills proposing a state secede unless slavery was abolished, have you?
Sadly, the bill did not pass. Yet it inspires me to see seven names connected with my family tree (Nickerson, Doane, and Robbins). Grandpa’s middle name was Robbins; his mother’s parents were Robbins and Nickerson. Perhaps some of your own ancestors are in this list of signers.
I know we can just as easily find dark histories buried in our family trees, but we can at least be proud of these brave people who signed this in 1848. And surely to get to the point of creating a bill, they must have been fighting slavery long before.
Taking a closer look in the document itself, with eight parts, I-VIII, we see slavery declared:
“a covenant with the death, and an agreement with hell”.
The proposed bill decried that as long as the Commonwealth consented to slavery, the government would be “morally and politically responsible for all the cruelties and horrors of the slave system.” The bill also requested, in near-poetic and faith-filled words:
In writing history – family history or a historical biography— using a little math humanizes characters so we can see them as former living, breathing human beings.
An ancestry chart can provide nuts and bolts about people: birth dates, death dates, marriage dates. But how can those dates tell a story?
While researching one interesting true character in my own tree for a history magazine article, I learned the following about a guy named John. Read (but feel free to skim) this next paragraph. I guarantee it’s boring, but a fresher approach follows:
John Martin Gose (1825-1919) married Hannah Jane McQuown (1831-1925) in 1854. They moved from Missouri to the Washington Territory in 1864 with five children, Thomas Phelps (b. 1855), Dora (b. 1856), Mack (b.1859), John (b. 1861) and Christopher (b.1863). They arrived in Walla Walla in 1865. A sixth child, Oscar (b. 1865 or 1866) was born there.
With no additional information other than those dates and locations, can we discern more about what this family was like and make their story more interesting?
1 calculator + 1 family tree = more compelling stories.
Doing a little math with the dates provided, this picture emerges:
24-year-old John and his wife Hannah, 22, began their year-long journey on the Oregon Trail with five children all under ten years old. In their covered wagon were Phelps (9), Dora (8), Mack (5), John (3) and Christopher, a nursing baby. After arrival in Walla Walla, Hannah had another child, Oscar — she’d been expecting him either during the during the arduous journey or shortly after arriving in the new settlement. Years later, when the children were teens, tragedy struck. To the devastation of John, Hannah, and the siblings, Oscar died when he was only 12 years old.
Although I was able to confirm that yes, they traveled the Oregon Trail, dates and locations alone strongly suggested that initially. All other details in the previous paragraph came from my simply subtracting birth dates from death dates, then imagining what that must have been like for them. Who knew math could tell a story?
Does this give you an impulse to look at your own ancestral tree in a new way? Eager to find stories about your own family history? Whip out your calculator too! Let me know what stories you discover.
This digitally archived vintage 1915 yearbook included student nominations for Best Fusser, Class Suffragette, Class “Burns” and Class “Harriet Stowe”.
What great fun it is, reading my grandparents’ 1915 WaHi yearbook, from Walla Walla High in Washington State. It’s like peeking through a window into their teenage personalities!
I found the digital copy, via Google Search. Yearbooks back then were cleverly written (this one, by the Junior Class) with much detail about their classmates. That high school year, with fewer than 70 Seniors, there was room in the yearbook to playfully describe each graduating student in numerous entries.
Included was “An Ode to 1915”, a long poem with stanzas for each student. What a kick it was for me to find these, about the teen versions of my Grandma Gladys and Grandpa Ken:
My! But Gladys was gymnastic, can speak for election;
And that car they call a “Ford,” she drives it to perfection;
She went on an English picnic once and now her friends recall
That in trying to cross the river—she from a log did fall.
I can easily imagine athletic Gladys trying to cross a river on a log. As for her Ford, it was most likely a Model T. And she did love to talk!
I also found a stanza about Ken:
There is a boy in our class whom we are proud to claim;
He is very studious—Kenneth Pierce is his name.
He’s won fame in speaking and (perhaps you don’t know it),
But he is quite famous in the role of a poet.
Ken’s last name was misspelled Pierce (vs. Pearce) by his classmate. But it was Grandpa, for certain – the only Kenneth in his graduating class. Other places in the yearbook mention Ken’s love for poetry and further display his and Gladys’s personalities:
Each student was assigned a personal motto:
It was fun to see that Gladys’s was: “No wild enthusiast ever yet could resist”.
That certainly fits a girl who would later hop a steamship to India! I knew that Grandma played basketball, but it was revealing to see she was involved in drama, speaking, singing, speaking competitions, and organizing social events.
The motto assigned to Ken was: “Night after night, he sat and bleared his eyes with books.”
He definitely was a studious one, graduating that year from high school at only age 16. He played the violin, and in the school’s “House of Representatives” loved leadership and debate. (Later at the young age of 25, he’d be put in a role of leadership in India.)
But as you’ll see, he was also very playful.
Quick aside: I originally sought out this yearbook to see Ken’s high school graduation picture. That’s because Gladys, in a letter written ten years later, wrote that the boy she once knew had filled out as a man, and had “a very fine mustache”.
It’s easy to see his little-boy looks in his high school photo at age 16:
Here’s a different picture showing what he looked like nearly ten years later, when she fell in love with him. (I found this one among family photos.) I couldn’t figure out why they were “just friends” for so many years. He certainly did grow up after high school.
The Class Ballot offered clues about personalities, plus 1920s events:
[Class Ballot: from the 1915 Wa-Hi yearbook, published in 1916.]
It’s interesting that there were nominations for such things as Class Suffragette (women still did not have the right to vote) and Class “Harriet Stowe”. I assume the latter referred to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and that this classmate a vocal abolitionist.
As for “Class Pigmy”, “Noisiest Girl”, or “Lightest-headed Girl” — those weren’t terrifically flattering. Other girls were probably OK with “Jolliest Girl” and “Class Zoologist”.
“Best Fusser” for Gladys mystifies me, only because I can’t figure out what the word meant back then, in this context. The common dictionary definition of a “fusser” is someone overly concerned with details. It does seem from other entrees in the yearbook that Gladys was a busy-bee. Perhaps she loved overseeing details in her role on the Student Entertainment Committee.
I see Grandpa Ken (last name spelled Pierce again) voted “Class ‘Burns'” as in the famed Scottish poet, Robert Burns. Sure enough, in some of Ken’s later love letters to Grandma, he quoting Burns’ love poetry!
The 1915 yearbook also included fictional stories and predictions
One fiction story in the book was ‘On the Little Pend o’Reille’” by Kenneth Pearce, in which Ken wrote about a dramatic cougar attack. (I’ll put it in another blog post later, as it’s quite exciting.)
Another student writer, Lois Porter, wrote predictions of the future for each student, based on their personalities. It was a bit like the “Most Likely To…” lists you see in modern yearbooks, but with a playful twist. She began it:
In the city of Walla Walla, by the city of Milton, by the city of Dixie, lived a people wise and courageous, brave and athletic, the tribe of the Seniors, the children of the Walla Wallans; and their abode was Walla Walla High School.
Lois Porter, 1915 WaHi Yearbook
About Gladys, she wrote: “Thou, O Gladys Gose, shalt mighty waters cross. In a strange language with strange people and in strange lands shalt thy voice rise in anthems of glad tidings.”
I suspect that teen Gladys must have talked of wanting to travel. It would be eight years before she actually crossed any “mighty waters to strange lands”.
Here was Ken’s:
“Thou, O Myrl Higgins, O Lucy Magallon, O Kenneth Pierce, O Winnie Griffith, and thou, too, O Harold Hayden, shall cast thy lot together and members of the Kalem Company shalt thou become. Exciting and romantic shall be thy future…”
The Kalem Company was an early American silent film studio founded in NY City in 1907.
Indeed, Grandpa enjoyed drama. In the Senior Play, Manoeuvers of Jane, he played Prebendery Bostock. (Gladys played Constantia Gage.) A decade later, Ken would write Gladys from his ship to India that he’d dressed up as a flapper for a masquerade party, to the horror of the missionaries onboard (and now to my amusement)!
After Gladys joined him, they would act in the play The Importance of Being Earnest to entertain a small group of British friends. (During the Raj era, acting in plays was a common way for expats to make their own entertainment). However, Ken’s future work would be as a logging engineer—a bit more sedate than work as a silent film actor.
Slang and Sports
Some slang in the yearbook was unique to that era:
“… we are not “digs”, for we manage to have a good time wherever we go. If we do not get it in the study hall with paper wads, we get it in the gymnasium at parties and dances.”
But any athletic teen today can relate to excitement over sporting events, including a basketball game (in which I proudly say Gladys played Center):
“A great deal of enthusiasm had been worked up and many guesses were made as to the winners of the girls’ and boys’ inter-class basketball series. The girls’ games were played first, starting Wednesday, December 2. On this date, the seats in the gymnasium were crowded to the limit and everywhere class spirit was shown by the yelling and shouting of the class rooters.”
There’s so much more I discovered in this yearbook. I’ll summarize by saying the yearbook naturally included courses of study (many though, I didn’t expect to see in a 1915 high school) and photos of athletes in 1915 sports attire and in various clubs. The yearbook also included ads from local businesses (1920s prices, of course) cartoons, and jokes. I spent hours poking through the yearbook — more entertaining for me that the average Netflix movie and certainly more fun that reading current pandemic news.
A good end note to this post is the Last Will and Testament of the Senior Class, where items were ‘willed to’ the Juniors. That included ”the new swinging locker doors with which to dent your skulls,” and “the nerve racking game of Town Ball,” another version of baseball.
As a writer my urge to correct that spelling of nerve-wracking is overwhelming, but I do resist editing words written by teens 105 years ago.
To read the 1915 yearbook in full, click here: WA-HI Yearbook — have fun looking at the ads, too: you could buy a new Ford for only $440.
Fellow writers or genealogy fans: you may have as much fun researching your own family members’ vintage yearbooks. Leave a comment with any questions or tell me what you discover!
Here’s a Journo Portfolio review for freelance writers who’d like to quickly and easily create an online portfolio:
Authors wanting to create an online portfolio showcasing their writing may find this helpful. In my case, I needed one place to round up posts (from three different blogs), articles archived online at publishers’ websites, and magazine article clips (in PDF) from 32 years of writing! Journo Portfolio seems to do the trick.
You may also find this helpful if as a freelance writer you have written for a variety of publications, and on many topics. It can help literary agents or editors see the full scope of your writing career.
How to upload blog posts or articles archived at publisher websites to your own portfolio:
Since I just started my page at Journo Portfolio yesterday, so far I’ve only had a chance to upload my blog posts and a few magazine articles archived online. It was very fast and easy. I uploaded links to 35 posts in about 3 hours. It would have taken half that time (or less) if I hadn’t opted to tweak the post descriptions.
If you want to create your own, it’s free to start with 10 article links, then $5 for a month for unlimited. For a few other features you can go to the $10 month plan. (And no, I’m not a spokesperson for them, just a random author who found this site helpful so want to pass on a few things I learned so far about using it.)
As for starting your own: first create a login, choose a banner, upload your photo, and name your portfolio (you can start with the free version). Then you’ll see a giant plus sign, at the bottom left of your page. (See example below.)
Click that, and at the home button (picture of a house) you can see your dashboard.
When you click Articles + it’s simple: just copy and paste the link from the website and it will import the link with a photo and some text from the article. It will automatically import to your Home page unless you have already set up other pages.
NOTE: if you want to start out simple, you can just skip creating other pages for now, and all articles will automatically upload to your Home page. The upload will already include the article photo and the first few paragraphs in the description. Bam! Done!
But I do think it prettier to make link descriptions shorter, sort a lot of articles by tabs/pages, and add tags for Google to find your portfolio more easily. So here’s how to do that if you want to go deeper:
How to add pages to your portfolio to sort articles by topics or magazines:
If you want to create tabs (other pages) on your site for different article topics or names of publications you’ve written for, create a new Page. The tab is automatically auto-created. This bumped me at first because I expected it to be more difficult!
You can see in my first image the tabs are Home, 1920s Historical Memoir, Writing Tips, Parenting, and Books. I may change that as time goes along. I found it easiest to first upload links to my Home page, as that has links to all articles in chronological order.
After importing my history-related posts, then creating a new tab for those, I did have to designate they show on both the Home and 1920s History Memoir pages. (See below, “Blocks to display on”).
Note in the image below, where it says “Search blocks” it’s simply searching for the pages/tabs you created. (“Blocks” means pages in this case.) If you don’t indicate a page, it won’t show on any, so at least choose one block for your link to show in. (But as I said, if Home is your only page, you don’t have to mess with this.)
Note above the Text Excerpt field. Journo Portfolio with automatically grab the first few paragraphs, but I chose to shorten those, usually to the subheading in my original article. (The example above is from my post A Sure-footed Dhurzee & a Sly Cook.)
By the way, you can also set Journo Portfolio up to continuously import a feed or all articles from your own blog site. I can’t decide if this is a good option. When I elected that option after I uploaded some links, a few were duplicated.
Also, since a portfolio seems to be public from the time it’s created, I didn’t want a bunch of links posting without my handcrafting the descriptions first and checking the photos. Some photos at my old sites are not so great and I’d like to update those and possibly even the articles themselves before adding them to my new portfolio. (Some old articles contain now-irrelevant links.)
Also, a feed to automatically import new articles is not necessary; it’s a cinch to add the links yourself, and update the descriptions to be sure they looks good.
Also, in the settings area you can add tags. That will be a little additional work, but wise so that Google grabs the new portfolio when people do relevant searches.
By the way: to find website links to your old material, insert your author name in quotes in Google Search. (It’s quite revealing what Google does find. Do you know it shows your last three tweets, if you are on Twitter? Tweet conscientiously!) Google Search is how I found a few of my old archived articles.
Check, too, for alternate spellings of your name. Some sites may have listed your byline without your middle name, or with your middle initial, or using your maiden name (if that was formerly your author name).
Uploading scanned magazine article clips in PDF to your author portfolio:
Next up for me will be a bigger project: scanning my old articles (tearsheets from print magazines) into PDF. If you already have yours scanned, kudos to you! You can get rolling with that right away!
Some of the print magazines are still going strong, for example Writer’s Digest, but don’t have all articles digitally archived (that I could find yet). Other magazines I wrote for have gone entirely out of print or may have articles archived under a new company name with a digital website.
For example, I was formerly was a contributing editor (continuous writer) for Christian Parenting Today (CPT) print magazine (1989-2005), which had about 300,000 readers at its peak. CPT was a sister publication to Virtue and Today’s Christian Woman magazines. All were stellar print publications taken over by Christianity Today (founded by Billy Graham). A few of my parenting articles with them are archived now at the Christianity Today site.
Most of my CPT articles I’ll have to take a day to scan and upload. But I do want to include them in my portfolio, as it shows the range of topics I’ve written about, and most of the parenting articles offer perennial advice.
I didn’t thoroughly explore any other portfolio creation sites, so have none to compare them to. I saw Journo Portfolio recommended by The Write Life blog, so I simply dived in I’m pleased so far.
Do feel free to comment if you have any questions or thoughts about this!
