The Story About The Story
Once there was a woman from central England named Elizabeth Wheeler. She was born around 1805, and in a strange way she became my great grandmother. Well, great great grandmother.
Until a short time ago, no one in our family knew about her, and yet she was one of those who came to the new world and connected with others here to establish one line of our family.
It’s an unlikely story, with twists of all sorts, and gives me joy to contemplate even so. Here it is:
Elizabeth met and married George Bailey near her home in the area of Calne, Wiltshire Co. (near Stonehenge) and had a number of children. It appears they lived on a boat, or right on a wharf, and George worked for the coal merchant, hauling coal by barge from the not-too-distant coal veins to the little town of Calne. And then George died.
A young relative of the coal merchant, Charles Wilcox Tanner, came to work for his uncle three years before at about 16 years of age. And apparently he gallantly rescued the poor widow, nearly 20 years his senior, moved onto the boat, and … married her.
I know he married her because they had children together, three boys named William C, Frederick, and Charles.
And then they came to the US, when the boys were tiny.
I have some evidence that at least one of her original children also came to the US, but the story veers away from those other kids at this point.
William grew up to work in the theater in NYC. I don’t know where Elizabeth and Charles W went: maybe the rest of the family was in NYC for those intervening 30 years before we find them again.
But then suddenly Elizabeth died. That was about 1880, when she was about 73. And Charles W died soon thereafter. Both were living in CT then, on the Stamford-Greenwich border. And as that happened, their boys, now in their 30s, reappeared, all together.
My great grandmother Mary Jane Reynolds was living in Greenwich at that time, but I have no idea if she met Elizabeth.
Mary Jane was married to … someone … in Greenwich. (I’m protecting real people here.) And somehow Frederick met her teen daughter, Isabelle. And guess what happened next?
Yes, Mary Jane’s daughter had Frederick’s baby. And a second. And then Mary Jane had Charles’s baby and another. And Charles’s second child was my grandmother.
So, to sum up: One great grandmother and the son of another great grandmother got together and made my father’s mother. And a whole lot of other descendants centered in S CT were born through another child she had with him, and these offspring spread around and about.
Yes, these two grandmothers lived near each other, and may easily have met. It doesn’t matter (though I would like to know): We’re undeniably here so it worked out somehow.
I just want to say that I love these two women: a great great grandmother and a great grandmother, one born in England, one in New England. It’s a messy story, so very human every step of the way. Love happened.
And what happened next was also messy. One of Frederick’s children ended up in jail for a while, his wife Isabelle died, and then he died. But their daughter grew up and was raised as a sister to my grandmother. Until she disappeared after having four children.
She was called Bella. She may have children out there, my cousins, products of two lines of family combining, in this case my family.
With the 1950 US Census about to be released, I may have the tools to find out what happened to her, and to her three daughters.
Why do all this? It’s a kind of love, I think. A kind of responsibility to make sure they’re not forgotten. To let them know their family remembers and cares. I’d be happy to find out. To find Bella and those who came after.
Stories like this are pieced together out of tiny bits of information collected over time. The dots, so to speak. And those dots can be connected in various ways. The search is a matter of working out a real mystery.
And the dots may take a long time to collect.
So there’s another side of it: the keeping of our own information, the telling of our own stories. Both for accuracy, and for becoming discoverable at all.
Does it bother me that these grandmothers of mine were far from perfect? No, honestly no. So then how do I feel about people knowing how imperfect I am? After squirming a bit, I realize I don’t have to go into every detail. But how people met people in our family, what they were interested in, who they had for kids, all these things make great stories, our stories.
I recommend we all get around to telling our own. I like Ancestry.com and familysearch.org (free) for record-keeping and storytelling, and 23&Me for health and biological connections.
In the end, that’s how I may find out what happened to Bella and her babies. Someone will tell a story or take a test, and we will find each other.
It’s already happened for me, and my newly found cousins are treasures. But even if you just write down your facts, someone will find them, and rejoice because they have found your dots, and more, if you want.
