family history

[flea]

While I was in MA early this month, my mother and I escaped from the hot house (power was off on a 90 degree day) leaving the menfolks and chilluns to nap, and went to look for my great-great-grandmother's house. My grandmother wrote a lot about visiting there - she and *her* grandmother, who died when she was 16, were very close - and I found a decent description of it on a web site about Woburn MA historic places:

"The 1790 House: 827 Main Street, North Woburn
This magnificent Federal period home on the banks of the Middlesex Canal was originally built in 1790 for Woburn’s first lawyer, Joseph Bartlett. Shortly before completion, however, it was purchased by Col. Loammi Baldwin who hoped to convince the expatriate Count Rumford to return to live in Woburn. Though these
dreams were never realized, the author Frances Parkinson Keyes [first cousin to my great-grandmother, an apparently a notable woman writer of the early part of the last century], who spent childhood summers in the home, refers to it repeatedly in her memoirs as the "Count Rumford House". Legend also suggests that the house may have been a "station" on the Abolitionist "Underground Railroad" in the pre-Civil War era. In 1815 Hall Jackson Kelley conducted a private school for boys in the spacious mansion, but closed due to
his inability to attract "scholars". It was while he taught here that he first read the newly published
"Journals of Lewis and Clark". Kelley conceived a passion for the Pacific Northwest and became the prime advocate of the United States laying claim to modern Oregon. His experiences as a "mountain man" and explorer in that region are legendary.

Because of its grand design and setting the 1790 House was frequently the scene of soirees and balls
commemorating important events in Woburn. In 1800 it was the scene of Baldwin’s great Centennial Ball. In
1803 a gala was held to celebrate the opening of the Middlesex Canal. The 1790 House is listed on the
National Register of Historic Places."

So, without too much difficulty, we found it: http://www.flickr.com/photos/casperflea/sets/814199/

At the time my family lived in it - ballpark 1900-1930 - the house was the parsonage for the local church, I think Presbyterian. My great-grandmother, Avis Wheeler Hill Berle, grew up there and met her future husband (Theodore Protas Berle) when he was a boarder aged about 30 to her 8 years old. They married immediately after her graduation from Wellesley College in, I think, 1907. My grandmother, the 3rd of their 4 daughters, was born in 1913.

After we found the house Mother and I drove into Woburn Center (the house is just outside the I-95 beltline, and technically in North Woburn). We were hoping to find the cemetery where great-great-grandmother Frances Wheeler Hill was buried in 1929, according to my grandmother under a headstone chosen by her husband that read "She Was and Is a Saint," which shocked the family and the congregation. All the city offices were closed at 4pm on a Friday, but a very helpful young man at the Woburn Public Library (itself an architectural marvel, ca. 1880: http://www.woburnpubliclibrary.org/) pointed us to his folder of information about Woburn burying-places and also the hand-written card file of names that appeared in the local Woburn papers from about 1900-1940. We didn't find an obituary for Frances Wheeler Hill, but both papers carried descriptions of the wedding of Avis and Theodore at her parents' house - apparently a very fancy wedding for 1907 Woburn. My printouts of the fiche are at home, but I'll transcribe them for this one day.

I wish we'd had more time at the library - there were lots more avenues to pursue for information. I love libraries.

Comments

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[richtermom.livejournal.com]

for a couple hours at the library without the kids. Sounds like BLISS.

[orthoepy.livejournal.com]

Frances Parkinson Keyes was amazing! I highly recommend her autobiography -- she was married to the gov of (later Senator from) New Hampshire. When they moved to DC, Senators made squat and they were broke, so she took up writing: journalism and novels. She was one of the first American women to write as a journalist in China! She was very famous.

Her novels are ... well-plotted, but the characters are leaden and mostly props to make sure all the history is imparted in the right place. Each novel has a long author's foreword going over her research, shout-outs to helpful journalists & notable people, and lists of where she wrote the actual books (her house in New Orleans, her estate in Virginia, the Queen Elizabeth, etc. -- she made a LOT of money writing, eventually!).

Her house in New Orleans is well worth visiting; she restored the Col. Beauregard house to its antebellum majesty. She herself lived in the slaves' quarters.

A devout Catholic, she also wrote lives of the saints and other devotional works.

I totally had a spate of reading all her books, and if I come across them now I donate them to the Keyes-Beauregard house in New Orleans for them to sell in their gift shop ...

Okay, sorry to go on so long but it is so cool that you're related!

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

We have a family copy of her autobiography, which I've skimmed, because she talks about her cousin Avis and so forth. She seems to have been quite a woman! I gather formidableness was a common characteristic of the women in that side of the family - it skipped my great-grandmother, who was rather a doormat with a dictatorial husband, but was certainly present in g-g-, my grandmother, and at least some of her sisters, one of whom became an Episcopal priest in Utah!