HOW THE GENERATIONS PASS - Healy, Richardson, Stevens, Sherwood

This week I've spent a lot of time typing up the entries of an old journal of my great-great grandmother - Rosina Jane Richardson Stevens, who went by Jane. It's difficult to read some of her beautiful cursive writing, but definitely worth the effort. She began writing when her mother died in 1872 and seemed to only take pen to diary when one or another family member passed on or a similar tragedy occurred. She sounds rather pessimistic in her writings, but her narrative shows that life was not easy. Their family made many moves while trying to establish themselves in farming or business; she lamented business losses (e.g., fire in furniture store, financial debts, cyclones wreaking havoc on their farm, and the loss of siblings and children. Theirs was not an easy life in the late 1880’s for those lower to middle class families who were trying to make it in either business or farming the land.

It’s wonderful that she left this short 18-entry journal. Two of the last few entries give lists of events with places and dates recorded. The first is an outline of the moves of her early marriage. Only 19 moves in 18 years – you can hear the satisfaction in her voice as she mentions that they were still living in Elgin, Minnesota six uninterrupted years later. It appears she actually stayed there many years more.

In her journal she hoped that her life would have value to someone who she had touched and due to her experiences, was always reminding herself that we need to be ready because “we don’t know at what day or hour our call will come” to pass on to the next world. Considering her brother, Nathaniel Healy, died of Consumption, while in London and reportedly feeling better; her sister Mary Dexter died suddenly of heart disease and dropsy, and a little unnamed but not unmourned niece or nephew died at the ripe old age of 22 months, her anxiety in this regard was not unfounded or exagerated. Reading this 134 years later, I’m struck with how her life did have the meaning she desired it might have to those who followed – and how her jotted notes of decades past touch my heart even now. We’re not so different, she and I, but I do feel more optimistic. But on the other hand, my life is much easier, so why wouldn’t I be.

Our lives have intersected in another way as well. She and her husband apparently couldn’t have children and they later adopted their six year old niece, Eldora Julia Dexter who they named Ella Jane Stevens. So she is my blood relative in a roundabaout way, but being my great grandmother’s mother, she is my true great-great grandmother as well. She was the one who was mom, even though her sister was her daughter’s birth mother. I have a slight interest in those first parents, the Mary who died of dropsy and her first husband, Levi, who passed away when Ella Jane was an infant, but it is enough to see great-great Grandma Jane reflected in my grandmother and later my father. Both, including the two generations before them, had strong faith in God and looked for His help and comfort in time of need. I don't know what might have happened if Eldora Julia had grown up and lived her life unaffected by grandma Jane, but Ella Jane is person our great-grandmother became.

In 1883 Great-great Grandma Jane wrote

"Elgin,[Minnesota], Nov. 8th, 1883

No cyclone here Sept 21st as predicted but one passed over us eastward, striking [illegible] in Wis., doing much damage. My health is quite poor and I feel it s my duty to divide some precious things that were our mothers. I am growing old. Soon the places that know us now will know us no more." This "predicted" cyclone would have been the one everyone feared after the devastating ones of July 21st and August 21st of the two months previous. Little did she know that her life would become easier as time went on. In spite of her feeling old and her own "prediction," she lived almost three more decades until February 1912 -- a few months before her granddaughter, my grandmother, Susan Rosina, graduated from high school. She had a long time to live before it was her turn to be the one passing on.

I'm loving reading her words, feelings her thoughts and feeling our hearts reaching out to each other across the century. Perhaps from the gates of heaven now, along with Grandma Susan and her son, my Dad, Great-great Grandma Jane watches me read her words and knows that all of them, and the rest of the family who are already there, live on in my heart. As Grandma Jane said when her sister passed on, "I trust to meet you there with many loved ones gone before."