OUR ELUSIVE SURNAMES
Copied from the Faulkner List:
Perhaps the following article will give us a clue as to why some of us are unable to find the surname of some of our Great, Great Grandmothers.
Not too long ago, I stood in a beautiful little cemetery in the town of Broadalbin, Fulton County, New York, copying interesting tombstones. A woman drove up, parked her car a few feet from me, and emerged with a pot of fresh, red geraniums in her hand. She very carefully proceeded down a long row of ancient tombstones, some of which were so weathered that it was impossible to read them. Halting before one near the end of the row, she paused, then placed her offering at the base of the stone.
"My great-great-great grandfather," the woman told me proudly. "He was in theRevolution."
"Really?" was my sage reply.
The woman continued to gaze reverently at the ancient stone for a few more minutes, then entered her car and drove away.
Somewhat later, as I admired the flowers, it occurred to me that the woman had neglected to place any flowers at the base of her great-great-great grandmother's grave, which was to the right of the man's. Born in 1756, this woman too had lived during the American Revolution. Though she hadn't carried a musket or fired a cannon, perhaps she had made bandages for the wounded, or perhaps, as many women did, she made sure that the crops were harvested and that the stock was fed while her husband was off fighting the British. Perhaps she had lived at the very edge of eighteenth-century civilization and had had to look constantly over her shoulder for hostile Indians.
Was she not a veteran too? Unfortunately, no one seemed to be heeding the brief motto at the base of her tombstone: "When this you see remember me."
Nothing in American history seems so ethereal as the married woman of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. She literally disappears before your eyes into lists of "married women under 45," or she is named only as the "wife of . . . ." How many times have you searched cemeteries for the distaff side of your heritage, only to find a gravestone such as this one?
Hannah
Wife of Pilgrim Durkee
Died Nov. 9 1841,
In the 68 Year Of her age.
Ah, Hannah! Where did you come from? What was your name before you married Mr.\line Durkee? Where were you born? At least the above stone does give you a clue as \line to the year in which she was born. Some stones of married women do not even do that.
The main problem here is that when Hannah Whatever-Her-Maiden-Name-Was married Pilgrim Durkee, she became Hannah Durkee, and as far as the legal system of her time was concerned, she no longer existed. She could not sell any property she may have inherited from her father. That property now belonged to her husband to do with as he pleased. A married woman could not even sign a legal contract.
When the great novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe was ready to publish her masterpiece, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," in 1853, her husband had to sign the contract with the publishers for her. Mrs. Stowe was forty-two years old at the time and the mother of six living children. But the law considered her to be invisible.
So how can genealogists locate someone who is "invisible?" It is not easy. But it is not impossible. I have seen many researchers give up because they cannot locate a great-great-great grandmother's maiden name. The important thing to remember here is not to give up. She is your ancestor too; and if she had given up, you would not be here today.
Yvonne P. Divak is currently working on history projects regarding Saratoga County, N.Y. She enjoys visiting cemeteries and has been active in the Third Tryon County Militia and the 77th N.Y. Reenactment groups (the first for the Revolution; the second for the Civil War).
