52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 16-A Quiet Life
Prompt: Not every ancestor was a swashbuckler living a life of adventure. Who in your family tree had a quiet life? What have you found to make their story more detailed?
The prompt suggests an ancestor that did not lead an adventurous life, but that would describe most of my ancestors—many of them being salt-of-the-earth, small-town farmers or miners.
So, are there other ways we might define a “quiet” life?
We could consider quiet in its literal sense. I don’t think any parent would describe raising children—particularly in the numbers that many of my ancestors had—as a quiet life, certainly not from the perspective of volume. And, although I think we could all agree that living in a big city is not a quiet existence, neither is a rural life. The sounds produced by farm animals, farm machines, and farmhands can create their own din.
We could consider a quiet life defined by a place where one can find solitude, I suppose. A monastery or nunnery. A remote cabin deep in the middle of a great forest. A bungalow on a private beach.
Rather than quality of life issues based upon decibel levels, family planning, physical location, or how many other people lived nearby, for the purpose of this assignment, I chose to use a broad-spectrum conception of “quiet.” Rather than examining one ancestor’s personal life experience, I contemplated the idea of quiet lives in a more global, collective sense.
What would it have been like to live one’s entire life never knowing what it was to be at war?
I wondered how many American ancestors I could find who lived in a time without American involvement in military combat at all—during which time there was peace—or quiet, if you will.
A person would have to have been born and died within a very specific window of time, of course. I also calculated that the person could not have lived to old age. Only twenty-seven years elapsed between the end of the “Great War” and the beginning of what would come to be termed the Second World War. This is the longest period of time that the United States has not been at war.
I did a search of my entire tree, filtered by birth and death dates. I excluded still births and those who died in infancy or as young children. That left about 20-25 ancestors who had lived and died during this specific period of time.
Interestingly, one of the first ancestors I looked at had been born in 1919 and died on December 7, 1941. A young man, having died at the age of 22? The first thing I thought was, “Wow! This ancestor must have died at Pearl Harbor!”
I had not previously attributed a place of death for this ancestor, but there were plenty of hints on his profile, directing me to sources for that information.
What I discovered was a scenario not nearly as honorable as dying in service to one’s country. James Gratten “Tucker” Begley had died 5,000 miles away in Dungannon, Scott County, Virginia, having been shot during a dispute. The ignominious details can be found in the newspaper article below.
Here are some other ancestors who popped up in the filtered search:
- David Hammett Cathcart (1919-1936), 16, who contracted pneumonia after practicing outside with his high school band.
- Lawrence Everett Garoutte (1919-1931), 12, whose death was caused by accidental drowning.
- Mary Louise Laney (1919-1937), 18, who died after a self-induced abortion.
These are some of my takeaways after this exercise:
- There were very few ancestors whose lifetime did not overlap with at least one war, sometimes more.
- Those ancestors that fell within this limited time frame led quiet lives in the sense that there was no war and–in the case of the young men and their families—no fear of being drafted.
- The short lifespans and tragic deaths of these ancestors is a sad contradiction to the national peace—or quiet—that existed at that same time.
At top: Allegory of Peace and War, 1776. Pompeo Girolamo Batoni (Italian, 1708–1787). Collection of The Art Institute of Chicago
