Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Genealogy:

Poetry can hold clues to family

Stefani Evans

Stefani Evans

In 1916, Fred Sutton commemorated his 56th birthday with "that never failing sign of age, a piece of poetry."

In the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, ordinary folks often philosophized in rhyme and crafted poems for special occasions, just as Fred did. Mourners memorialized loved ones with verse. Even with limited educations, our ancestors were more fluent and more comfortable in their mother tongue than we are today. Despite varying skill levels, each poem is a historical record created by a specific individual at a specific time for a specific reason. If we refrain from critiquing our ancestor's verse and simply read his words we will find the genealogical clues he buried.

My great-granduncle Fred Sutton presented the original of his 1916 birthday poem to his parents, and he gave a copy to his brother Roy for Roy's 43rd birthday. Sutton's poem, "The Old Wash Pan," opens at mid-day, on nearly every late-19th-century midwestern American farm:

"Father and the farm hands, myself and other boys,

Have just come in for dinner, summoned by that awful noise

From the old tin horn whose music grows sweeter evermore,

And we gather round the cistern pump near by the kitchen door,

To wash our sunburned faces and necks black with the tan,

And each one takes a little dip from the old wash pan."

Commonplace scenes such as that described above played daily on most American farms, but they were usually recorded, if at all, only within the family. Fred's birthday verse sanctified the routine, allowing us to observe. The poem becomes uniquely Sutton as he calls out his siblings by name:

"There was Clyde, and Lee, and Charley, and Willie too and Roy,

The oldest was a man in years, the youngest but a boy.

There was Maggie, there was Edith, and little Edna May,

All helping dear old mother, and trying to smoothe [sic] the way;

There was father and the hired men, yes, good old Dick and Dan,

And I think I see their faces, in the old wash pan."

Because Sutton named his fellow actors, his 1916 seven-stanza vignette recalling his youth and the family farm is of equal value to his descendants as to descendants of Clyde, Lee, Charley, Willie, Roy, Maggie, Edith and Edna May. It is of value, also, to those begat by hired hands Dick and Dan.

Mary (Schuyler) Fisher's Dec. 14, 1843, lament (contributed by Stacy Oberdin Kaminski from Thomas H. Fisher's 1995 unpublished work, An Abbreviated Genealogy of the Fisher Family with Allied Lines Mentioned), illustrates how one nineteenth-century woman composed verse to cope with loss. As she grieved her nephew's November 1843 drowning in Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River, Mrs. Fisher chronicled the event for future researchers:

"I knew not that the monster death,

Had chosen that bright hour,

To rob the father of his son—

The mother's first born flower.

T'was so before the sun at eve;

Uncrowned his glorious head—

Beneath proud Susquehanna's wave,

The little boy lay dead."

Mary Fisher's eight poignant stanzas guide her reader to Susquehanna River valley newspapers, cemeteries, and church records to discover more about the drowning death of her young nephew, John H. Fisher, his parents' first-born child.

Henry Livingston, newspaper carrier for Nicholas Power's Poughkeepsie Journal, penned his first Carrier's Address Jan. 1, 1787, "A New Year's address of Richard and George two boys of the printer N. Power" (http://www.iment.com/maida/familytree/henry/writing/poetry/ca1787.htm). His verse sings of post-Revolutionary Poughkeepsie "as the plot of nations thickens." Livingston is credited by some as the actual author of "The Night before Christmas," rather than Clement Clarke Moore:

"Before the friends of Mr. Power

In this good-natur'd happy hour

Respectfully we both appear

And wish you all a Happy Year.

You see in us a brace of chickens

Who, as the plot of nations thickens,

Deal at your doors each Wednesday morn

The sun-shine of the week — or storm."

We seek documents that journal family events and relationships in archives, courthouses, and libraries. But we can't overlook clues buried in scribbled doggerel on paper scraps preserved in family collections. We seldom encounter family poets of Livingston's uncommon ability. Happily, our family verse doesn't have to be good to be valuable. Skilled genealogists will find clues in poems written by kin because, as Oscar Wilde observed, "All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling."

Stefani Evans is a board-certified genealogist and a volunteer at the Regional Family History Center. She can be reached c/o the Home News, 2360 Corporate Circle, Third Floor, Henderson, NV 89074, or [email protected].

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