Grandma's blueberry battalion

Forest blueberries. Source: USDA.gov

 © 2022 Christy K Robinson 

My grandmother, Lois Stone Steen, of International Falls, Minnesota, was a monster about wild blueberries. 

My great-aunt Helen (top-center) at age 18 in 1933,
blueberry picker!

My Arizona parents scheduled the annual 2,000-mile road trip to coincide with the Minnesota blueberry picking season in late July and early August, and the aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors were recruited to go out picking en masse. Everyone either arrived at the rendezvous with pails, pots, or plastic buckets or were issued them in a military-style operation. 

It was an all-day event with a break for sandwiches and coffee at lunchtime. I was just a little kid who probably ate a third of the berries I picked. And though the only thing I had to worry about was touching poison ivy, I suppose that the adults were bear spotters. 

My grandmother Lois with her blueberry collection pot,
her sister-in-law Mary, and sister Helen (age 38 here),
with my uncle David (eating blueberries), cousin Linda, and aunt Harriet. 

Blueberry pickers at lunch time: Lois's husband Harry Steen, Louis Prebil,
Russell Stone, Helen Stone Prebil, David Forsell, Harriet Steen, Mary Stein Stone,
and Terry Stone.

At the end of the day, we dumped our pails into a big tub in Grandma's back yard, and the berries were rinsed and air dried. 

My cousin Trish said, "We used to go out all day with Grandma Anna [Glad-Hall] and pick outside of International Falls, cleaned them by putting a wool blanket on a table and rolling the berries over the blanket. All the leaves stuck to the blanket. A lot of the berries were frozen after cleaning and enjoyed all winter.”

Finally, over the next days, there was baking. There was canning. There was freezing. There was jamming. There were blueberry pancakes.

The blueberries came back to the relatives, neighbors, and church members as treats in many forms. When I say "monster," it's because it was an operation she organized, and many people were happy to participate--and enjoy the fruits thereof. 

Seeing scans of old albums like the 1933 photo above, makes me think that the blueberry madness was something my grandmother, the oldest child of six in a financially strapped family, learned from her mother and grandmother. My cousin Trish's memory of her grandmother Anna (who was my grandmother's aunt by marriage and a good friend of my grandmother) indicates that the blueberry hunters were foraging and harvesting the forests around their town, to supplement their diets all year. By the time I came along as a child in the 1960s, it was more of a traditional social event than a harvest so they'd have food in the cellar.

If you've speed-read this article to the end so you can find a recipe for wild blueberries, I'm sorry. This is not a recipe blog. It's about history and ancestry. I wish you well in finding a great recipe for cobbler or muffins (I'm a jammer and sell or give my jams in November and December). But I hope this anecdote about picking berries in summer will resonate with your own personal history. 

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Christy K Robinson is author of these books (click the colored title):  

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

And of these sites:  

Discovering Love  (inspiration and service)

Rooting for Ancestors  (history and genealogy)

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

Editornado [ed•i•tohr•NAY•doh] (Words. Communications. Book reviews. Cartoons.)

When the dog days of summer are actually dog months

I offer up these photos of my great-aunt Helen Stone Prebil, doing what she and her sisters often did in the winters of International Falls, Minnesota. Temperatures could often be -40 degrees for days at a time. The weather there is so extreme that my mother, who had been born with severe lung disease, had to spend some of her high school years with relatives in warm and dry California. When she was 18, she married my father and they prepared to move to Arizona for her health. Phoenix has long been known as therapeutic for TB and asthma patients. Living here extended her life by about 35 years. 

Family road trips took almost 3 days and nights of driving,
in the days before the interstate highway system.

I was born in Phoenix, where the daytime summer temperatures can be 112-120º for days and weeks at a time, punctuated by the occasional humid day with monsoon storms. It takes imagination to survive those days even with expensive air conditioning, wet towels on the shoulders, and fans. It takes thinking about snow and drinking iced tea.

When my mom was younger, she'd tell me about how her crazy aunts Ruby, Ruth, and Helen would go out into the International Falls snow in their swimsuits and take pictures of how brave they were. Sure enough, my cousin scanned this one from her grandmother Helen's album. Obviously taken in the 1930s, it was in black and white. But with photo editing apps and utilities, I've colorized it to immortalize great-aunt Helen frolicking in the snow.

I hope we all feel cooler for having seen it!

The disowned Quaker

 © 2022 Christy K Robinson

In my family tree, I have numerous lines of Quaker Friends. But this story is about the ones that got away. They were disfellowshipped from their Quaker congregation. 

Henry Willetts and Charity Willson were members of the Muddy Creek Meeting from 1785 in what is now High Point, North Carolina. Previously, they’d been members in good standing of the (Quaker) Friends Meeting at Kingwood, New Jersey. Charity’s parents and grandparents were members of the New Jersey Friends.

 

Jemima Jane Willetts, colorized

Jemima Jane Willetts was born on December 20, 1787, to Charity, age 38, and Henry Willetts, age 38. Jemima was the eleventh of 14 children.

 

Birth of son

Her son David was born on March 22, 1813, in Stokes County, North Carolina, when Jemima was 25 years old. Did Jemima have an affair with a married man? Was she assaulted? She obviously wasn’t able to marry the father of her baby. 

 

Friends Meeting censure

In June 1813, Muddy Creek Monthly Women's Meeting records show that Jemima Willets was accused of misconduct for "having a child in an unwed state."  She was dismissed from membership there--disowned. 

It looks like two of her brothers were dismissed from the Meeting at other times, for misconduct. The reasons are not publicly recorded. 

 

Jemima’s father Henry made a will that was probated in 1816, leaving about 500 acres and a house to two of his sons and his wife Charity, along with horses and tack, blacksmith tools, and household goods. The residue of his estate was divided equally between his daughters, including the unwed Jemima (good for him!). 

Leaving the South
(The 1820 US Census has a Henry Willetts and five white family members, plus two young enslaved women and four enslaved children under 14 years of age, living in Brunswick, North Carolina (far to the south) and engaged in agriculture. I can’t see Quakers as slave owners, and Henry was probably dead, so this is probably a different Henry Willetts.) 

Charity and most of her adult children moved to Geauga County, Ohio in about 1820, but records show that Charity died that year.

 

In 1823 in Ohio, Jemima married the Irishman and recent United States Army veteran Alexander Harper; they had three children together. At this time, Jemima’s eight-year-old son David became a Harper, and his numerous descendants have believed him a Harper for 200 years. But it appears that David Harper was never a Quaker: his wife was the daughter of three generations of clergymen of Dutch descent, and David and his wife were buried in the churchyard of their Methodist church near Peoria, Illinois. 

David Harper and wife
Christenah Vanover, 
colorized.

Jemima’s husband, Alexander Harper, died after 25 years of marriage, and she married Andrew King, a twice-widowed father of six adult children, on December 21, 1850, in Peoria, Illinois. Andrew King died after 20 years of marriage to Jemima, and she went back to using her previous married name, Harper. She died on February 17, 1877, in Hanna, Illinois, at the age of 89 years. She, her two husbands, and her son and daughter-in-law are buried in the same churchyard, probably with other children and step-children. 

One of David Willett-Harper’s many children, Maria Elizabeth Harper (see another post about her HERE), was my great-great grandmother. Her son was a carriage painter and finisher, like his step-grandfather Alexander Harper. 

Maria Elizabeth Harper Stone,
holding my grandmother,
Lois Elizabeth Stone, in about 1914. 

I was showing photos to my second cousin, a descendant of Maria, David, and Jemima. When she saw Jemima’s plain black dress and bonnet, she laughed. “She doesn’t look at all like a Quaker!” (meaning that Jemima looked exactly like a 19^th-century Quaker). 

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Christy K Robinson is author of these books (click the colored title): 

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

And of these sites:  

Discovering Love  (inspiration and service)

Rooting for Ancestors  (history and genealogy)

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

Editornado [ed•i•tohr•NAY•doh] (Words. Communications. Book reviews. Cartoons.)

A no-good, horrible, terrible day

© 2022 Christy K Robinson

I was looking at the events in the life of my great-great grandmother, Mabel Alice Rowley Hall, when I noticed that she had a baby on the 26th of July, 1904 -- and that her eldest child died on the same day. 

Eighteen-year-old Archie propped his gun against a fence and crawled through it. His dog knocked the gun over, which went off and killed Archie.  

On the same day, Mabel gave birth to her son Earl Martin Hall. 

I don't know the order of the events of that day, but I wonder if the pregnant Mabel heard about the death of her eldest child, and she went into labor with Earl. 

I don't have photos of Mabel before 1937. She lived a very difficult life, eloping with Martin F Hall when she was 15. He was often away from his wife and children for up to two years at a time, which meant that Mabel had to support the children. Mabel and Martin divorced quietly in 1915, and in later years Martin seems to have been an alcoholic. People of their time often hid the fact they were divorced: Mabel listed herself in the 1920 census as widowed, though Martin would live for another 24 years. She and her adult children attended Martin's funeral, but by then she had been married for 16 years to an older man. 

Mabel's timeline shows that she, her siblings, and her parents moved from settled Connecticut, where Rowley generations had lived for 200 years, to homestead on the Minnesota prairie. She eloped at 15 and bore her son Archie at age 17. Her daughter Edna married young and moved to another county and seems to have had few ties to the family, and another daughter married young and moved to the west coast. They lived through two world wars, the Spanish influenza pandemic, huge complex fires that wiped out their property, the Great Depression, and the deaths of family members. They had very little money. Her sons and grandsons served in wars while the women remained to tend farms and live off the land. She had diabetes and was overweight in the 1937 photo, but by 1941, she was slim. She died in 1946, a few months before her daughter and grandson perished in a vehicle accident while living in another state. 

But imagine the tragedy of losing one son as you bring another into the world. 

Mabel A Rowley Hall Lattimer, age 71

Christy K Robinson is author of these books (click the colored title): 

We Shall Be Changed (2010)

Mary Dyer Illuminated Vol. 1 (2013)  

Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This Vol. 2 (2014)

The Dyers of London, Boston, & Newport Vol. 3 (2014)  

Effigy Hunter (2015)  

Anne Marbury Hutchinson: American Founding Mother (2018)

And of these sites:  

Discovering Love  (inspiration and service)

Rooting for Ancestors  (history and genealogy)

William and Mary Barrett Dyer (17th century culture and history of England and New England)

Editornado [ed•i•tohr•NAY•doh] (Words. Communications. Book reviews. Cartoons.)