More Family Secrets
52 Ancestors Week 36: We Don't Talk About It from Amy Johnson Crow
Ironically, I didn’t see this prompt until today and had already written about this topic yesterday in my post called The Letter. If you’d like to, go read that first. I will wait, I promise.
My family has tons of secrets and so I am going to write about this theme more than once. The stories of my maternal mothers need to be told and remembered. They were all incredible women who were controlled and badly treated by some of the men in their lives AND they were the strongest women I’ve ever known/known of. This particular story is a secret that is over 100 years old. My grandmother never spoke of it, and I didn’t learn about it until decades after her death.
When they were married, my great grandparents, Walter and Eva were 19 and 22. He was the youngest of 7 siblings and she close to the oldest of 15. While their families both farmed, Eva’s family was likely less well-off, and Walter was probably considered quite a catch. Eva was one of a twin, and the two girls were so close they even got married together.
Eva was very close with her family and her closest sisters. Right after marriage, she and Walter settled down and farmed close to both families. Their first 2 children were born there. However, 3 years after their marriage, Walter moved the family to Minnesota. For the first time in her life, Eva was alone without extended family, and managing a busy farming household. They lived there for the rest of their marriage, and the other 3 children were born there. This included the youngest, my grandmother, who was born in 1910. The family was prosperous, but Eva was lonely. To help with the household, a young maid named Reaka lived with them.
Sometime between when Elizabeth was conceived and about 1917, Walter started an affair with Reaka resulting in a pregnancy. This apparently was the last straw for Eva who went back to Hardin County with the oldest Beulah, and the two youngest, my grandmother and her older brother, Clarence. Eva divorced Walter in 1917.
Eva lived the rest of her life working in domestic service, sometimes living with her children’s families. While I never met her, she was said to be a bitter, dour woman with no happiness in her, even for her grandchildren. She died in 1950.
Walter’s 2 marriages and my grandmother’s growing up apart from some siblings was evident to me in the genealogy book I’d received in high school. I was living in Hardin County at the time, and big “D” divorce was still a shameful secret to people in the 1970s. I couldn’t, and still really can’t, imagine the terrible names Eva was labeled with, nor the shame she must have been made to feel for her own “mistake”. It made an impression on me at the time, and I grew up with that being one of the big questions I wanted to answer with my genealogy. Even in that book, the word divorce wasn’t used. The facts I relate above were mostly unknown to me.
In 2011, when I visited with the family genealogist who prepared those original books for our family, this was one of the first questions I asked him. What had been so horrible that my Great Grandmother wanted a divorce in 1917, given the terrible repercussions for such an act.
“He got the help pregnant!” Enlow looked at me with all seriousness. Stunned, I tried to absorb that for a minute and before I could get a grip on that fact he went on. “She went to Chicago and got an abortion, and it ruined her ability to have children”.
Holy freaking cow.
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
In recent years, when relating that tale to an aunt of mine, she said that her husband had always wondered why my grandmother hated her stepmother so much when they would visit his grandfather. I certainly think I understand.
In our part of the family, it was never talked about. However, for Enlow, as a child of the eldest of Eva & Walter’s children, his was a different experience. His mother would have been old enough to have seen and understood the entire affair. She didn’t carry the shame of it like my grandmother did by growing up in a broken home. For his family the reasons behind the divorce were not hidden.
My memories of Grandma’s siblings are very limited. One brother died before I was born, and the other I don’t remember at all. I do have a lot of early memories of “Aunt Nellie” and “Aunt Beulah”, her two sisters. Nellie would occasionally visit from Minnesota, and Beulah lived within a couple hour’s drive for their whole adult lives. Grandma’s siblings were at least close enough to have gathered for this portrait once they were adults, in spite of having grown up apart.
Additionally, during the depression Grandma and my mother lived with Beulah’s family for a few years before she married the grandpa I grew up with. As a part of this series, I’ll write about her life in another post. But here is a last picture of Eva with her daughter Beulah and granddaughter, my mother Patsy, taken in Hardin County about 1932.
I like how you think. Let those skeletons out! They only stay scary if you keep them in the closet.
Once again, you have captured me with the story of your great grandmother and her stepmother in the secret kept hidden for over 100 years. Eva Whitesell certainly suffered from betrayal and then shaming. No wonder she became bitter. You are reclaiming her innocence from beyond! Brilliant.