Guiding Questions

Origins and History of this Project

          It all began soon after Mom died.  Here was a woman who, as the mother of five teenagers, would often find her kids' friends hanging out with her at the kitchen counter because she was such a delight to talk to, so funny and charming, so gifted at making people feel good about themselves.

          "C'mon, Lampland, let's go!  We're late for the party!"

          "Hang on, willya Mike, I'm talking with your ma here!  Sorry ma, but anyways, so like I was sayin' . . ."  

          Our friends called her "ma" too.  But only after they'd sat down and talked to her at least once.  (Betty Delehanty Schroeder in 1969, age 41)

            She had a gift for reading people, for knowing what made them tick, and for making them feel good about themselves.  Like Emerson's "Gentleman," she was somehow able to relate in a positive and productive way with every type and kind of human being, from the most erudite scholar to the lowliest ditch-digger, no matter the class, no matter the color, no matter the condition in life.  Deep in her bones she knew how to put people at ease, draw them out, find the best in them.  I never met anyone who didn't genuinely enjoy her company.  Canny beyond repair, font of fierce and boundless love, riotous humor, and remarkable displays of practical wisdom, she really was one in a million. 

          There was never a time in our lives when we didn't feel toward her a deep emotional intimacy.  Even as rebellious and irreverent youth.  Even when she was really pissed off.  It was just always there, like the earth or the sky.  What a gift that was.

          Then one night, at the youthful age of 59, she woke up at three o'clock in the morning with a crushing pain in her chest, unable to breathe.  A massive coronary.  A few minutes later, with her husband Cliff frantic at her side, she died.  With dirt under her fingernails from the day's gardening.  She loved gardening.

Betty Jane Delehanty Schroeder,

a year or two before her death in 1988 at age 59

          Then, as the days and weeks passed, from the depths of our grief came an impulse, a notion, a kind of inchoate hunger to transform our profound sense of loss into something creative, something positive, to try to recapture something of the joy and intimacy of the connection from which we had been so suddenly and prematurely severed.

          So we (Mike & Tom) hoofed it down to city hall to find our great-grandmother's death certificate.  We knew who Mom's mother was -- Grandma, of course.  Genevieve Sullivan Delehanty had lived with her daughter Betty since Betty's birth, and with us grandkids through most of our childhoods, till she grew too ill and had to go into a nursing home, where we often visited her (though not often enough). 

          For whatever reason, the good Lord decided to pack into Genevieve's life ten lifetime's worth of suffering and death.  But despite all the pain and heartache she'd suffered in her 82 years, she never grew embittered.  Instead, remarkably, the exact opposite was true.  Distilled through her spirit, in a mysterious alchemy known only to the Creator, all that heartache and suffering was transformed into something very close to the quintessence of love.  Maybe all that pain and hardship led her to understand, in the deepest recesses of her soul, what the whole point of life really is.  Maybe it stripped away all the nonsense and foolishness -- all the egoism & desires to buy stuff & accumulate stuff & drive fast & have great sex & have whiter teeth & seek personal pleasures of every type & variety -- leaving behind only the things that truly mattered.   Whatever the case, to us she was, and remains, quite simply the most wonderful person ever to inhabit the planet.  But we knew absolutely nothing about her ancestors.  Probably because her stories inevitably would turn into tales of hardship and woe, and because she didn't want to burden or toxify her beloved grandchildren's fresh young minds, she'd never talked about her family history.  (Genevieve Sullivan Delehanty, Christmas 1965)

          And then, there it was, plain as day.  Grandma's mother was named Jennie Sullivan, born Jennie Lang, in Burr Oak, Michigan, on November 10, 1866.  Jennie's mother was named Ella Kinsman, born in New York, and her father Frank Lang, born in Germany.

The section of Jennie Sullivan's death certificate that was key to all our subsequent investigations on Nellie's life and ancestry.  

♪ ♫  Copious praise & accolades unto the impeccable memory of Grandma's sister Mary Sullivan Church, our Aunt Maime!  ♪ ♫

          Ella Kinsman?  Frank Lang?  We'd never heard of either one.  Who were these people?  Where did they come from?  What were their stories?  And by learning about them, by uncovering their stories, what might we learn about ourselves?

♣

         And so the journey commenced -- a journey that continues today, nearly 20 years after marching into city hall to find Jennie Sullivan's death certificate.  It's had many twists and turns, with lots of stumbles and missteps and unexpected detours along the way.

          Ella Kinsman, it turns out, lived an extraordinary life -- Ellen, Ella, Nellie, and Nettie, tagged in various periods with the surnames Kinsman, Lang, Blowe (or Blow), and, lastly, Church -- a character whose many names only begin to hint at the richness and complexity of the life-paths she followed.

          Usually she went by Nellie, so that's usually what we call her here.  She's been elusive, this Nellie, and so she remains.  We have no photos, no letters, no physical artifacts of any kind, except our own flesh and blood. 

          Well, that's not exactly true.  There are two physical artifacts that she herself created that survive into the present-day.   These consist of the two tiny X's she made when she "signed" her divorce papers in Hastings, MN, on January 25, 1871.

          She actually "signed" twice.  Her first X is very tiny -- its longest line less than 8 millimeters.  Her second X, after she'd been recalled to testify a second time, is half again as big (12 mm) and exudes considerably more self confidence.  These X's, atop a mountain of other indirect evidence, suggest that Nellie Kinsman Lang was able to move with uncommon swiftness from unease and indecision to self-assurance and decisiveness. 

          We are not making this up.  Take a look.  Here is her first signature, which we will call X-1.  This signature followed her testimony detailing the abuse and suffering she experienced as Frank's wife.  Note especially how tiny X-1 is, and carefully drawn so as to avoid touching any surrounding letters:

X-1

          X-1 is tiny, tiny, tiny.  Here is her second signature, which we'll call X-2, inscribed later the same day after she was recalled to the witness stand and gave additional brief testimony on her knowledge of Frank's current whereabouts:

X-2

          X-1 appears not only miniscule but tentative, unsure of itself, almost embarrassed -- as if she were afraid that her mark on the page would intersect with the adjacent words, and made sure it didn't.  One envisions her scrawling X-1 slowly, laboriously, her shoulders hunched, pen grasped tightly in her fingers, face a few inches from the paper.  The first-drawn part of X-1, which we will call X-1a  (sloping from upper left to lower right)  shows a substantial concavity over a distance of less than a centimeter -- an arc inscribed very carefully, yet traversing a miniscule distance.  Try this yourself, and imagine the frame of mind required to make such a tiny mark with such deliberation and focus.  

          X-2 scarcely resembles X-1.  Indeed, it appears to be a different signature altogether.  Not only larger and more distinct -- with the pen pressed more firmly into the paper -- X-2 also appears far more confident and self-assured, boldly crossing over into an adjacent word.  The slight arc in X-2a  (the first-drawn segment)  follows an arc opposite to X-1a's!   In fact X-2a is slightly S-shaped, with two distinct slopes -- the first segment angling sharply down at about 58°, the second trailing off to the right, with a tiny upward jog at the terminus -- a kind of letting go.  X-2b is almost perfectly straight, and very close to 45°, conveying a strong suggestion of self-confidence and certainty. 

     These are, in short, two very different signatures -- in some ways mirror images.  Emblematic of this difference is the opposition between the last-drawn line, X-2b, which suggests strength, pride, and resolute spirit, and the first-drawn, X-1a, which conveys fear, weakness, and shame.

          There is also the matter of the dot under X-2, which Mike hypothesizes represents not an ink smudge, but a deliberate laying of the pen on the paper -- a final mark, a final period.  "That's it," she seems to be saying.  "My marriage to Frank.  My putting pen to paper.  My final X-marks-the-spot.  It is done.  It is over.  The End."

♣

          This quasi-serious, somewhat silly, largely self-satirical exercise is meant partly as a joke (and partly not -- these really are the only physical artifacts directly from Nellie Kinsman Lang, at least that we've uncovered, and they really do have a story to tell), and partly to illustrate the paucity of evidence at our disposal.  Mainly it's meant to show the extent to which we've been compelled to grasp at the tiniest fragments in order to try to understand something of the contours of Nellie's life.

         Uncovering that evidence was made all the more arduous by our initial ignorance about commercial genealogy services like Ancestry.com.  That's probably because we launched our investigations during the time period commonly known as the Late Pre-Internet Age.  

          When we started, lacking both modem and cable, not to mention Internet service provider (there being no such thing as the Internet -- we say it twice because some readers might at first find the concept incomprehensible), Mike examined census records from Burr Oak before visiting the area in the autumn of 1989.  Rummaging around in the local public library, he gathered a few stray bits of data on some Kinsman's who lived in Burr Oak Township from the late 1850s.  A couple of farmers, Asa E. and Sheldon Kinsman, along with their wives and kids -- Mary Kinsman, Sarah Kinsman, some others.  But no Ella Kinsman.

          Mike also solicited recollections from the few surviving friends and family members.  By this time he and Tom had gathered together a good handful of documents -- obituaries, death certificates, letters, census data.  With this material Mike put together a little booklet for his siblings for Christmas 1989.

          Then, the following year, working in the National Archives with genealogists buzzing like bees all around him, Mike decided, on a lark, to see if maybe Frank Lang had a Civil War pension file.  He did!  It was long, too.  And complicated.  So was William Schroeder's pension file, which Mike also copied.  But he was a busy guy, that Mike, what with books to read, exams to prepare for, a dissertation to write.  So he perused those old pension files, took a few desultory notes, and filed them all away.

          And there things sat for the next 15 or so years.  Then, in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century (on Thursday, December 8, 2005, at 7:35 p.m., to be exact), Mike got the notion to revisit those old family history files.  It occurred to him that writing it up all afresh might make a nice Christmas present for his kids (Sarah, then 16, and Tim, 12).  So he dusted off the old files and started digging around again.

          He started writing, and soon hit the same dead ends he and Tom had hit 15 years before.  Soon it became a real puzzle, a real mystery.  And few things are more engrossingly fun than trying to solve a really good, really challenging puzzle.  Especially when it's really cold outside and much of the past year has been spent working your ass off and squirreling away provisions.

          In the meantime, as we've seen, something called the Internet was invented.  So now Mike had access to tons more information than he and Tom had had 15 years before.  So he wrote what he knew, and he dug for what he didn't know.  And he wrote and he dug, and he dug as he wrote.  He got lots of help, too, from a very kind lady.  And gradually, in fits and starts, as the snow piled high outside his window, the pieces of the puzzle started coming together.

          After three mostly sleepless weeks, the result was a 45,000-word, 200 page manuscript -- part genealogy, part detective story, part act of remembrance, all act of love.  It's published here, warts and all (most if it anyway -- some parts toward the end were left out, being too recent and too personal), its sundry mistakes and infelicities left largely intact. 

(Thumbnail of cover of one of seven known extant hard copies of The Awesomely Gripping Saga, initialed by the author; reproduced with permission)

 

          Here's an especially juicy egregiously erroneous passage on Nellie:

Excerpt of p. 24 from one of the seven known extant hard copies of The Awesomely Gripping Saga (reproduced with permission)

          In fact, Mike was entirely wrong in his supposition that Nellie had likely died between 1871 and 1884.  As his awesomely gripping account of those feverish days of researching and writing makes clear, he did not have opportunity to correct his mistake.  As Christmas Day dawned he still had no idea when Nellie died.  That was about the same time he learned that Nellie's divorce papers existed, after Tom described them to him on the phone.  But he had learned a lot more about her ancestry and youth.

          The 1850 census listing for Ella, key to discovering the date and place of her birth, not to mention her ancestry, was kindly provided by Mike's new-found Web-pal Margaret Bourdette at a critical juncture in his investigations, around Dec 18 if memory serves.  This was after a lengthy exchange in which Mike & Margaret explored various possibilities regarding Ella's identity.   

Excerpt of 1850 census listing Nellie, age 2

♣

         Now, with Christmas 2005 well behind us and this marvelous invention called a website before us, we can use these "Documents Pages" as a kind of clearinghouse and workspace for all the documentary evidence we've gathered -- a filing cabinet in which to store it, a place to gather it together, analyze it, interpret it, and try to understand what it all means. 

          We do that now with the documentary evidence on Ella Kinsman's first 18 years. 

Nellie to 18:  Evidence & Interpretations

          Ella Kinsman.  A motherless farm child.  Till age 7 raised mainly by her pioneer settler grandmother in rural south-central New York near the Pennsylvania border.  Then in the mid-1850s compelled to join a family migration westward through Ohio and Indiana to Michigan, with her hardscrabble farmer father Sheldon Kinsman, his third wife, and their children, and her farmer uncle Asa E. Kinsman and his wife and kids.  This much we know. 

          Here is what we suspect:  After leaving New York she became the family workhorse and outcast, exploited, neglected, perhaps abused, kept out of school due to her father's valuing her labor more than her education.  By age 12, estranged from her father and uncle and their families and itching to make a new life.  By ages 16 and 17, desperate enough to secretly marry and get pregnant by an abusive ne'r-do-well, leave Michigan for Minnesota, and never look back. 

         Yet we also believe that as hard as things became after leaving New York, memories of the love of her grandmother Mary Eaton Kinsman endured, in a deep and secret space, nourishing her spirit throughout her life.  A legacy of love she in turn bequeathed to her daughter Jennie Lang Sullivan, and to Jennie's daughter Genevieve Sullivan Delehanty, and to Genevieve's daughter Betty Delehanty Schroeder.  And thence by the grace of the Creator to us.

 

         Direct evidence on these years of Nellie's life is fragmentary at best.  Given her lack of schooling and the alacrity with which she married Frank, bore his child, and hightailed it out of Michigan -- as well as her father Sheldon's occupation as a pioneer farmer and woodworker, and her structural position within her family (as the only child of her father's first wife) -- it seems reasonable to suppose that she spent the vast bulk of her time performing domestic labor of various kinds:  washing clothes, preparing food, cleaning house, tending to the sundry needs of her smaller step-siblings.  (Right: Girl harvesting potatoes, early 20th c. California, www.dir.ca.gov/.../ YWExhibit4.htm )

          Trying to imagine Nellie's life during these years, one is reminded of the diary of Emerson Smith, a young farmer in Tioga County, PA, adjacent to Nellie's birthplace of Chemung County, NY (diary available on Tri-Counties Genealogy & History by Joyce M. Tice, http://www.rootsweb.com/~srgp/jmtindex.htm).

          Each day in the late 1880s, Emerson Smith jotted down a few words about the day's activities.  In the spring it was "hauled stone, hauled stone, hauled stone," in the fall, "cut corn, cut corn, cut corn."   If we substitute "washed clothes" and "kitchen work" (or "domestic labor") for "hauled stone" and "cut corn," we feel we have a pretty solid understanding of the basic contours of Nellie's life as a child and young woman.  (Left: Girl washing clothes, ca. 1900, www.medivia.sele.it)

          There follow the documentary shards and fragments on which the foregoing is based.

The Documents

Before 1843   George and Mary Eaton Kinsman and Family Migration from Vermont and Southport, Elmira, Chemung Co NY

See The Awesomely Gripping Saga, end of Book I and beginning of Book III, for details on the migration of George and Mary Eaton Kinsman and family from Vermont to Chemung County, NY in the 1820s, and for more details on Mary Eaton Kinsman in particular; see also Ancestry Chart 7 on the family history of Mary Eaton Kinsman.

13 July 1843.   Marriage of Asa E. Kinsman to Sarah Rogers, Southport, Elmira, Chemung Co NY.

This excerpt from the Elmira Gazette from the Tri-Counties Genealogy & History by Joyce M. Tice  (www.rootsweb.com/~srgp/jmtindex.htm) shows the marriage of Nellie's uncle Asa E. Kinsman to Sarah Rogers, daughter of George S. Rogers:

13 July 1843:  A. E. Kinsman married in Southport to Miss Sarah Rogers, daughter of George S. Rogers . . . fine lot of cake received.

The same source also shows George S. Rogers died of "congestion of the lungs" on 23 Feb 1860 in Southport.  George's wife Susan (Susannah) evidently nursed her ailing husband until his death, after which she left Southport to join her daughter Sarah in Michigan, where she was recorded in July 1860 as living with Asa E. and Sarah Kinsman and family (see 1860 census, below).

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March 1848.   Announcement of Nellie's Birth in the Elmira Gazette.

The following transcribed document appears on Tri-Counties Genealogy & History by Joyce M. Tice  (www.rootsweb.com/~srgp/jmtindex.htm), an item in the Elmira Gazette describing Nellie's birth:

Southport births in 1848:  Kinsman.  Elect to Sheldon and Louisa.

Within the year Eliza Tuthill, the mother of "Elect" (Ella), had died.  Evidently baby Ella went to live with the family of her grandmother Mary Eaton Kinsman, who lived next door to Ella's father Sheldon, as shown in the September 1850 census page that follows.

13 Sept 1850.    US Census, George and Mary Kinsman and Family (including Ella [Ellen]), Sheldon Kinsman, and Asa E. Kinsman, Town of Southport, Chemung Co, NY.

One will not find "Ellen Kinsman" in the 1850 census, because for some reason the census-taker decided to record her surname as "Cinsman," not "Kinsman," despite all the other Kinsman's surrounding her.   Nonetheless, it is certain that this is her, living with the family of her grandparents George and Mary, next-door to her widowed father Sheldon, and only a few doors down from her uncle Asa E. Kinsman and his wife Sarah (Rogers) Kinsman.

1850 CENSUS GEORGE AND MARY KINSMAN AND FAMILY   George Kinsman 53 M Farmer NY Mary Kinsman 50 F   Mass Selma 22 F   PA Charles 18 M Farmer NY LaFayette 16 M Farmer NY Keley 14 M   NY Merritt 11 M   NY Hiram 8 M   NY Ellen Colstock 7 F   NY Ellen Cinsman 2 F   NY Nathan Wilcox 19 M Laborer NY

thumbnails:

 

1855-56.    Migration from New York to Ohio and Indiana.

One set of clues about Nellie's life in the mid-1850s comes from William C. Kinsman II, The Kinsman Family, vol. 2 (transcription kindly provided by Margaret Bourdette):

[Sheldon Kinsman and third wife Mary E. Burr] resided at Elmira, NY, Napoleon, Ohio, Wauseon, Ohio, and Burr Oak, MI.

A related hint comes from the 1860 census, which shows that Nellie's step-brother Sheldon, age 5, was born in Indiana, and that her step-sister, Mary, age 3, was born in Michigan (see 1860 census, below).  We thus surmise that the migration from Chemung Co NY to St Joseph Co MI took place in stages, with two brief periods of settlement in Ohio and one in Indiana before the family landed permanently in Michigan in 1857.

1857.   First Village Assessment Roll, Burr Oak, Michigan.

The following entry was one of our first clues about the Kinsman's in Burr Oak, MI, found in a notebook in the Burr Oak Public Library's "First Village Assessment Roll."  It lists a farm owned by "Bennett & Kinsman," as follows:

S.W. Corner Cliff Hooping and Hackman farm.  Bennett & Kinsman NE 1/4 of SE 1/4 40 ac. $1050 W 1/2 of SE 1/2 80 ac.     $1200 E 1/2 of E 1/2 of SW 1/4 40 ac. $200

It also lists neighboring farms.

Thumbnails below are:  (1) the page photocopied from the notebook, and (2) and (3), a couple of maps indicating the probable location of the farm.  It is not known whether the Village Assessment Roll referred to Sheldon Kinsman or his brother Asa E., but what seems important is this clear evidence that the Kinsman's owned land in St Joseph County in 1857, and the land's probable location.

   1857 Village Assessment Roll  

    ca 1910 map, Burr Oak Twp

    1988 map Burr Oak Twp

June 1860.   U.S. Census Listings of Sheldon Kinsman, Asa E. Kinsman, and Frank Lang.

In 1860, Nellie's father Sheldon Kinsman, age 44, was listed as a farmer in Florence Township, St. Joseph Co, MI with his wife Mary E. Kinsman, 40, and their five children (Sarah, 9, Sheldon Jr., 5, Mary, 3, Jackson, 2, and Thomas, 1), as seen in the following excerpt:   

The same 1860 census shows Nellie's uncle Asa Kinsman, age 41, in nearby Burr Oak Township, St Joseph Co, with wife Sarah, age 37, their six children, and Sarah's mother Susan Roggers, age 56: 

Meanwhile, Nellie's future husband Frank Lang is working as a laborer on a farm in Springfield Township, Lagrange Co, IN, about 10 miles southeast of Burr Oak Village (erroneously listed as "Frank Laug" in the ancestry.com database).    In August 1861 Frank comes to Burr Oak and enrolls in the Union Army:  

Where is Nellie in 1860?  We don't know, despite the exhaustive search described in Seeking Ella In Burr Oak Village, Mi, 1860.

1 April 1861.    Annual Township Election, Burr Oak MI.

In the early 1860s, Asa E. Kinsman tried to become something of a local political player in Burr Oak, starting the year after the village was incorporated.  This document shows that at the annual township election of April 1, 1861, Asa E. Kinsman received a grand total of one (1) vote for Supervisor, from a total of 299 votes.  Not an especially auspicious launching of his political career.

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10 Aug 1861.   Frank Lang's Enrollment in the Union Army in Burr Oak, MI.

Excerpt from Frank's Muster Roll showing he "joined for duty and enrolled" in Burr Oak on this date.  He and the rest of his unit mustered in in Monroe, Monroe Co MI on Aug 22, giving him 10-11 days to explore Burr Oak:

June 1863.   Volunteer Bounty Fund, Burr Oak Twp.

In June 1863 Asa E. Kinsman contributed $5 to the "Volunteer Bounty Fund" for the upkeep of local Civil War volunteers.  We know, this says nothing about Nellie, but it does show that her Uncle Asa was around and about in town, had an interest in public affairs, and had sufficient financial solvency to contribute $5 to a cause he evidently believed in.

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4 April 1864.    Burr Oak Township Election.

By 1864, Asa E. Kinsman had sharpened his political skills sufficiently to be elected as one of township's four constables, with 194 votes out of 1,119 -- apparently the pinnacle of his political career.

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11 Jan 1865.   Marriage of Frank Lang and Ellen Kinsman, White Pigeon, St Joseph Co, MI.

A very revealing document that shows that Frank and Nellie married while Frank was still in the army, and that they did not make their marriage official for another 13 months:

Frank Lang to Ellen Kinsman     This certifies that Mr. Frank Lang of White Pigeon and Miss Ellen Kinsman of the same place were by me united in the bonds of marriage at White Pigeon on the 11th day of January, in the year of our Lord one Thousand Eight Hundred and sixty five conformably to the ordinance of God and the Laws of the State. Filed February 7, 1866                   F. H. Davis  John C. Goss, Clerk               Minister of the Gospel thumbnail:

 

1 Aug 1865.   Frank Lang, Examining Surgeon's Certificate, Hillsdale, MI.

This document is included here because it shows Frank in Hillsdale, MI -- a few miles east of Burr Oak along the rail line -- on August 1, 1865.  Also reproduced in Frank's Civil War Pension File.

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7 Feb 1866.   Marriage License of Frank Lang and Nellie Kinsman Filed with County Clerk, St Joseph Co, MI.

See document above:  11 Jan 1865 -- Marriage of Frank Lang and Ellen Kinsman, White Pigeon, St Joseph Co, MI.

10 Nov 1866.   Birth of Jennie Lang, Burr Oak, St Joseph Co, MI.

♪ ♫  Thank you Aunt Maime!  ♪ ♫  Without your razor sharp bull's-eye memory on your mother's birthplace, birthdate, and your grandmother's maiden name, we never would have known where to look for Jennie's ancestry, and very probably would still be staring a big fat genealogical dead-end.  Not to mention the data on your long-lost never-laid-eyes-on biological grandfather Frank Lang. 

The accuracy of this information, relatively rare for death certificates, led us to suppose that Nellie and Maime were quite close, and that Maime knew a lot about Nellie's girlhood and youth.  This supposition was later confirmed when we learned that grandma Nellie and granddaughter Maime lived together in the same small house in SE Minneapolis from about 1911 to 1916, and that Nellie married Charley Church, Maime's husband's father, in 1916.  (Believe it or not, our hunches and intuition are generally far more accurate than not!  Which isn't to say that we don't make mistakes!  We do!  Especially Tom!  He's made so many it's almost impossible to count them all!  Just kidding Tom I hope you don't read this part!)

Anyway, regardless of its provenance, this information was and is pure gold.  So once again we say:

♪ ♫  ¡ Muchisimas gracias Auntie Maime !   ♫  ♪

Dec 1866.    Departure from St Joseph Co, MI, to Hastings MN.

As shown in Nellie's testimony before the court in her divorce proceedings, the family of three (Nellie, Frank, Jennie) migrated from Michigan to Minnesota in December 1866, with baby Jennie around one month old.  All things considered, it was an extremely risky move.  Interpretations of this period of Nellie's life appear in Book III of the Saga, many of which (excluding faulty chronologies) we still stand by.

Thumbnail of excerpt of p. 1 of Nellie Divorce Papers, which provide richer documentation on the next stage of Nellie's life:     

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Later Divorce Papers & Census Data.

Show that Nellie was illiterate throughout her life, unable to write her own name, but perhaps able to read simple sentences.  This is vital for understanding her first 18 years, for it means she never (or very infrequently) attended school.  It is evidence of an important absence in her life:  the absence of any kind of formal education.  It is also the main reason why we suspect she became the family workhorse -- a person whose capacity to labor was, to her father, the only thing about her that really mattered.

 

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