Hannah’s Story — A True Tale of a Short Life
Hannah Scott was a family legend, just a name my father remembered, though he had no idea of how she was connected. I set out to see if I could find out more.
Using local libraries, historical societies, state records, compilations done during the WPA (especially of cemeteries) and some speculative thought, I put together this about her life:
Hannah was born, in about 1813, in the vicinity of Peekskill NY to Elijah Scott and his wife, Sarah Marshall. She had brothers: Lewis (a farmer with his own acreage) and William (a sailor with his own sloop); and a sister Jane.
By 1833 or so she had met and married Alfred Adams, who lived in nearby Connecticut.
They lived in the small city of Stamford, Connecticut, and soon had some children: Augustus (1835), Mary Jane (1837), Chauncey (1839), and Charles (1841).
Then she died.
She died three days after Charles was born, which is the right timing for childbirth fever, or in other words an infection gotten during the birth, maybe from a midwife in attendance.
We didn’t have the germ theory of disease quite yet, so handwashing wasn’t necessarily a standard practice.
Charles lived for 6 weeks, which is amazing if he had no source of human milk, no wet nurse. Alfred was a factory worker, so he might not have been able to hire a wet nurse.
A year after Hannah died, Chauncey died. He was three.
Along the way, Alfred married Jane, Hannah’s sister.
I picture the household as having included Jane. Or perhaps she lived nearby, and when her sister died, she helped out. No doubt she helped keep baby Charles alive for as long as she could, and then tended little Chauncey and the older siblings.
Jane and Alfred had a couple of children, but this story is about Hannah and her offspring.
Hannah’s eldest, Augustus, who was deaf (or so it says in the census record), grew up and married Alice Donnelly, an Irish immigrant, in about 1855. They had four children, one of whom had children of his own.
And Hannah’s daughter, Mary Jane, married John Stottler, a German immigrant, and had several children, a few of whom survived to have children of their own.
And now, in 2021, I have tracked down several of their descendants, who are third and mostly fourth cousins. They are a delight to me. Some still live in the area where their great great great grandparents struggled through their days.
Augustus died in 1922, at age 87, a veteran of the Civil War. He was my great great grandfather. And his sister Mary Jane died at about the same time.
Hannah was 29 when she died. She could not have imagined the legacy she left. But as I contemplate the unknowns — the unknowables — of her life, I feel a connection.
It took me 20 or more years to put this much together. I don’t know much about her parents, only names and dates but not how they got to America or when, nor their parents nor even country of origin.
I haven’t gone into the details of how I found these few facts about Hannah, back in the 1990s. A few records, births, deaths, marriages, eensus records, had been kept along the way, and then I had to connect the dots. Now digitized records make it easier.
But if you’re interested in such a pursuit, I suggest starting not online but by asking your oldest relatives for names and places, and dates if they know them, and their stories.
A casual conversation with my father when I was about 10 introduced me to that one clue, Hannah’s name, and that led me to Hannah. With a little effort, she became a person to me.
How I would love a more detailed conversation with my father now! I wonder what else he knew, even if he didn’t realize he knew it. I believe he would have wanted to know what I’ve found so far, and even meet his cousins as I have.
Hannah died young, but in sense she is now more than 200 years old. Her short life gave rise to my considerably longer one and that of at least a couple hundred descendants, including a few in the 8th generation below her.
And she is one of 32 great great great grandparents I have. I wish I knew as much about each of them. The work goes on. It’s a joy.
Peg Lewis is a great-grandmother, a linguist, and a life-long writer and scientist. She was born in New England. She also lived in San Diego, Spain, Switzerland, Beijing, New Zealand, and the Pacific Northwest. She currently resides in Tucson in a 3-generation household where she is next-to-oldest.
Peg writes about the search for Hannah in her YA novel, A Rainy Night in G-minor.
