Matriarch Tales, Part 1 -- by Saga

In this blog I’ll be posting the stories I’ve heard and remembered about my maternal ancestors: my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunts and mother. The stories may or may not be accurate; family stories seldom are. But they have influenced me, often without my knowing.  I set them down here to remember and to honor these unsung women.   -- Saga



Nancy Alice, she with the seven children, is my great-grandmother.  She would have been born in the early 19th century.  Nancy wanted only one thing, so the story goes: a big white farmhouse.  Her husband John owned and farmed extensive land holdings near a river in western Indiana. Nancy would not have owned the land with him, being a mere woman and all, but she and the seven children would have worked the farm in one way or another.  John built Nancy’s dream house for her, and by all accounts it was the picture of Victorian elegance. Eager to please her, John even added a long grape arbor pergola from the house to the barn. When the house was almost finished, the family sat down to a big Sunday dinner around the big dining room table.  At first they ignored an odd rustling sound, but soon discovered that the barn and pergola were aflame and the house in immediate danger.  The menfolk must have rushed to put out the fire and save the horses, but the story goes that at the same time, they carried a mahogany corner cupboard out of the dining room and onto the lawn. It seems Nancy’s prized possession was the collection of Haviland china in that corner cupboard. The house burned to the ground and the only thing saved was that corner cupboard with the Haviland china.  I remember some of those pieces from the home of each of Nancy’s descendants for another hundred years. I have what is left: her tea pot, cups and saucers, and matching cookie plate.  There is another legacy from that fire, a lesson, repeated well into the fourth ensuing generation: Never let your dreams come true. Sometimes family beliefs are passed along, but the story of their origin is unspoken and unexplained. Though I didn’t hear the story until my fifties when it was too late and I has in hot pursuit of my dreams, I wondered upon hearing it about all the times my mother discouraged me from the career I’d chosen. I inherited all kinds of ideas and traits from the matriarchs and one of them is stubborness, or as we prefer to call it, persistence.

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