“In Praise of Aunts (and Uncles)"
...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
For me, history means context. Context is comforting. It means that whatever ridiculous thing is happening to me, chances are it has happened to many other people before me, and most of them seem to have survived, so maybe it won’t be so bad, right?
This did not work so well as I faced down the gauntlet of childbirth – twice. I knew too much. Rather than sailing into the joyous occasion with optimism, I spent too much time remembering what a frightening affair impending birth was to most women throughout history. Until quite recently, Newbury’s glowing mothers-to-be spent a good deal of time in prayer, getting their affairs in order, as the happy day approached (some still do). And it wasn’t just the labor, which is enough cause for prayer. It was the very real possibility that you, and the child you were carrying, would die in the process. Maternal death, pre-antibiotics, hovered around 2.9%. Not a huge percentage, you may say. Not so fast, sporty. Remember, you can expect to be expecting 10-12 times. Now your risk of dying is up to more than 30%. In the case of a maternal death, with eight or ten children (including, perhaps, a newborn), the most common path forward was a speedy remarriage to a woman who would then take over the rearing of the children. Families were formed and re-formed with astonishing frequency. But what if such a match could not be easily made?
Enter the aunts, and in many cases, the uncles.
In an earlier newsletter, I told you the story of my great-great-great uncle George Washington Noyes, whose kindness to Dick Johnson reverberated through our relationship. And, of course, my great-aunt Emily Noyes Poore was a pivotal person in my life. They are both part of a long chain of caregivers in my family, and so many others, who loved and care for young ones in addition to, or in the absence of parents. And of course, this was a critically important safety net in the centuries when mothers (and fathers) were much more likely to be gone.
There is a long history in my Newbury family, and many others, of one of its members, often the youngest daughter, eschewing marriage and children to act as the safety net for the rest of the family. At the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm, it was Aunt Eliza. Eliza Adams Little was born in 1861 at the farm, the youngest of four. Her siblings were all boys, and the oldest, Henry Bailey, left home early for a successful career as a banker. Her other brothers, Daniel and Ed Francis and their wives, Amelia and Sarah, lived at the farm with Eliza, who helped to raise their children. Tragedy struck the family repeatedly. First Amelia died after a long battle with tuberculosis in 1903, leaving behind five children. Then Daniel slipped under a train in 1912 and was killed instantly. Two of their children died of tuberculosis, and their only son left home. Eliza’s sister-in-law, Sarah, was bedridden for many years. Aunt Eliza shepherded the last generation of her family, her nieces Agnes, Margaret, and Amelia, into adulthood, and the four of them lived together until the end of their lives, a tight-knit community of single women devoted to each other and to the preservation of their family farm.
Eliza Adams Little, who raised her nieces and had a key role in the preservation of the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm in Newbury.
My family continues to reverberate from the death in 1892 of my great-great grandmother Charlotte Dyer Noyes. She was 28 years old, and left her husband, Joshua Dummer Noyes, and five children (they also had a son who died in infancy). Dummer, as he was known, was not able to either remarry quickly or care for all the children himself, so he kept the oldest two, Georgianna and Robert, ages 8 and 10, and sent one daughter to live with another family in Georgetown. My great-grandmother, Mary, and her younger sister Charlotte, ages 6 and 3, were passed around various family members for a few months, and then my great-grandmother was given to a family on holiday as a companion for their daughter. The family lived in Washington D.C., and according to family lore, Mary cried every day for a full year until the family sent her back. George Washington Noyes, her 20-year-old bachelor uncle, the youngest of his siblings and the least likely candidate to raise two young girls, stepped in and assumed the care of Mary and Charlotte, an act of extraordinary selflessness and kindness.
George Washington Noyes, who played a key role in preserving the Noyes family after the death of his sister-in-law
In a box upstairs in the Poore House there are hundreds of postcards, the text messages of their day, that flew back and forth between Uncle George and his dear Mary. When Mary, herself the mother of six children, died in 1934, Uncle George assumed a greater role in the lives of her children, taking her two youngest daughters, my great-aunts Louise and Emily, to New York City to distract them all from this terrible loss. Uncle George continued to send postcards almost daily to his great-nieces and nephews until his death in 1956. Many are from Byfield, just a thought or a joke sent to a beloved child. One can never know the alchemy that forms family systems, but Aunt Emily, born in 1919, was certainly given a powerful example of kindness and care by Uncle George.
Aunt Emily, like Aunt Eliza Little, was the youngest daughter. She also never married but remained in the house where she was born, working as a bookkeeper to make repairs and pay the taxes, while caring for a long list of children who lived with her. She cared first for her nieces – my mother and her sister, and then my generation, as well as a gang of neighborhood children who dropped in for cookies and Hawaiian punch. In the last decade of her life, she cared for my children – playing endless games of Connect Four with my son and Othello with my daughter.
Emily Noyes Poore plays Othello with her great-great-niece, Margaret Emily Groff, 2008
