At Long Last: The Australian Descendants of John Skudder, Jr. (1835-1883)

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In two previous posts, Searching for the Origins of John Skudder (c. 1796 – 17 Jul 1866) and Mary (Russell) Skudder (c. 1802 – Feb 1864), both of Southwark, Surrey, and also The Missing Ancestry of Thomas Burgin and Jane Skudder: What DO We Know?, I mentioned that John Skudder, Sr. and his wife Mary (Russell) Skudder had a son, John Skudder, Jr. who emigrated from England to Australia, and arrived there on the 25th of Nov 1852 at Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. What happened to him after that has been, at least from the North American Skudders’ perspective, a mystery.

A little more than two years later, on the 10th of January, 1855, a newspaper ad appeared in The Argus, in which John Skudder, Sr. and his wife Mary, writing from London, requested that their apparently uncommunicative son, John, Jr., please get in touch. As parents everywhere across the ages will relate, they hadn’t heard from him and they were worried.

The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.) Wed 10 Jan 1855; Page 1 (right hand column, fourth entry down)

A vintage newspaper announcement addressed to John Scudder from Horsleydown, stating that his parents are anxious about him and encouraging him to communicate with R. Ridoutt in Prahran.

“JOHN SCUDDER (sic), of Horsleydown, your parents are anxious about you. Communicate with R. Ridoutt, Prahan. 173”

Did John ever see this or answer? Was he even alive to see it? Did we have relatives in Australia, or was he simply a young voyager who disappeared into history? For at least most of the 20th and the first quarter of the 21st century, no one in our family knew the answers to these questions. Until…

Roughly a month ago, perusing cemetery listings as one does, I stumbled upon a FindaGrave profile for an Australian man named John Skudder. In the moment, I thought this was not remarkable, as I assumed there would have been multiple men of that name. One more profile to cross off the list and move on. But, in the bio section I saw a block quote that made me catch my breath. There, as part of an announcement of a second marriage, was a description of the fortunate couple’s respective fathers:

“Marriage Notice in The Argus of Jan 2, 1874: SKUDDER-WRIGHT. —On the 30th ult., at St. James’s, by the Rev. M. H. Becher, John Skudder, son of the late Mr. John Skudder, St. John’s, Horselydown, London, to Elizabeth, only daughter of Mr. R. Wright, Latrobe-street. Birmingham papers please copy.”

Thunderbolt! There it was in black and white, proof positive that THIS John Skudder, recently wed—evidently—to a woman named Elizabeth Edith Wright, whose parents hailed from Birmingham, England, was in fact OUR John Skudder who had more or less disappeared Down Under 174 years ago.

Wanting to prove it, though, to see for myself, I went to the Argus’ online archive. It was easy to find. Page 1 news, above the fold, top left.

From The Argus (Melbourne, Vic.: 1848 – 1957) Fri 2 Jan 1874 Page 1

A newspaper clipping featuring birth, marriage, and death announcements, along with shipping notices and railway information from Melbourne, dated January 1, 1874.

Enlarging it…

Marriage announcement for John Skudder and Elizabeth Wright, detailing the ceremony at St. James's and the officiant.

There it was, just as quoted on FindaGrave. Finally!

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The Death and Burial of Gertrude Lawrence Peabody (1855-83), as Recorded by Fannie Peabody

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In May of 1883, after having been ill for only a few days, Gertrude Lawrence Peabody, just 28 years old and the mother of two small children, died.

For more on the memory hole her absence left in our family, see this post here.

Recently, a kind and thorough researcher at Groton School, Alyssa Mattei, in the course of preparing for an article in The Groton Quarterly on Lawrence women’s contributions to that institution, happened upon my blog post and became intrigued. Picking up where I had been forced to leave off, she decided to go looking in the journals of the wife of the school’s founder, Fannie Peabody, which are preserved in Groton’s archives, for the entries on the days surrounding Gertrude’s death to see what she could find. It was a shot in the dark, but one worth taking. Long story short, Alyssa made a really wonderful discovery.

Over three successive days, Fannie meticulously documented the news of Gertrude’s death, accounts of her last hours, her husband’s and family’s effort to bear her loss together, and the funeral at Harmony Grove.

The only issue, once Alyssa had found the pages, was reliably reading the archaic script, and figuring out who was who. For that, she then passed the baton back to me, and I got to work. The rest of this post is my attempt to first read, and then document, what happened.

Why does this matter? Because as I wrote, years ago now in the post on Gertrude’s legacy, there is, or was, SO little known about her, especially including her death. These entries offer a deeply intimate look at Gertrude’s emotional composure while dying, some of her last words, the immediate reactions of family and friends, the comings and goings as people sought community and solace with one another and prepared for her service, the male relatives carrying her coffin, the actual hymns that were sung, the flowers placed in the grave, and the lasting grief as shock gave way to resignation…

It’s as though we can now be there, and in some small way, count ourselves among the witnesses to her life.

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Searching for the Origins of John Skudder (c. 1796 – 17 Jul 1866) and Mary (Russell) Skudder (c. 1802 – Feb 1864), both of Southwark, Surrey

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“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

I’ve often thought about these lines. And I’ve mused how they might apply, or not apply, to family history research. We look and look and look for the missing kernel of truth, the fact – the particular birth, the marriage, the death, and its dates – upon which we can build and expand and elaborate all the others that follow. But sometimes there is no kernel of truth. No one fact. Just a list of competing, though in the end not terribly different, theories. And the truth, if we are ever to know it, will be found not in one theory or another, proven correct or incorrect, but in the vague haze that surrounds all of them.

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Recovering a Lost Lineage: The De Fontevieux Family of Alsace, Paris, and Washington Co., Pennsylvania

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As many reading this can, I’m sure, attest, if one pursues family history long enough, sooner or later one runs out of stories touching on direct ancestors, and one starts to fan out in search of other subjects of curiosity and mystery, touching increasingly distant relatives.

And then, I think, a transition of sorts occurs, or can occur, from pursuing stories that have indeed been steadily retold, and really weren’t in any great danger of being tossed to the wayside, to ones that actually have been forgotten, truly lost, and now need finding once again.

This story hits both of those notes: it touches on a family not my own, at least by any blood reckoning, and to the best of my knowledge, it represents the reanimation of names and events that – like a beautiful Roman mosaic lying beneath a British farmer’s field – have been silently waiting, for years, to come back to light.

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Epilogue

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Cézanne, or maybe it was de Kooning, said a painting is never really finished, just abandoned at a more or less appropriate time. [1]  So it is for my efforts to gather back in a handful of the people and stories of our family. The rest of my life is calling, and I’ve got to go. A few words though, both philosophical and practical, to wrap things up.

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Old Books Worth Seeking As References

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This list is NOT by any means exhaustive. Consider it merely a helpful starting point.

(Arranged alphabetically, by major families.)

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Alden

  • Alden, Ayers, Byram Genealogy, by Charles H. Ayers [Currently available at Morristown, NJ public library.]

Amory

  • The Descendants of Hugh Amory 1605-1805, by Gertrude Euphemia Meredith, London, 1901
  • “The Amory Family,” by Delos G. McDonald, printed in NEHGS Register, Volume 120, April 1966, pp.81-83

Brandegee

  • The History of Ancient Wethersfield, Connecticut, by Henry R. Stiles, AM, MD, Vol. II, New York 1904, pp. 128-133.
  • History of Rye 1660-1870, by Charles W. Baird, New York, 1871; the whole book contains useful references, but see especially pp. 398-399
  • History and Genealogy of the Families of Old Fairfield, Vol. I, compiled by Donald Lines Jacobus, Fairfield, CT, 1930; republished Baltimore, 1976; pp. 107-109
  • The Early History of Berlin, Connecticut, An Historical Paper Delivered Before the Emma Hart Willard Chapter D.A.R., January 17, 1913, by Emily S. Brandegee

 

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A Brief Word on Dates

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If you ever decide to do some looking into your family history, and you make it back to, say, the early 1700s, you will probably see one or more dates written like this: Jan 7, 1719/20. Unlike what you might think, that doesn’t mean the author was unsure of what year the event happened in, so they wrote both; rather, it indicates the event occurred on Jan 7 of… either 1719 or 1720, depending on whether you go by the contemporary calendar of the time, or our modern calendar today. And, making matters worse, it was not a Jan 7 that was an even number of years removed from this year’s Jan 7. Worst of all, it may also have reflected a culture that didn’t acknowledge the new year until the end of March. March?

I know, “clear as mud.”

If you’re scratching your head at all this, the problem stems from a major disruption in the measurement of time that occurred when Europe, and Europe’s colonies, switched – slowly, over several years – from the calendar that had been employed by the Romans, aka the Julian calendar, to an updated system, adopted by Pope Gregory, aka the Gregorian calendar.

This is not a minor point.

It affects the citation of all “early” colonial historical dates in a meaningful way, and the explanation below is, I’m sorry to say, actually worth wading through…

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The Julian and the Gregorian Calendars

by Peter Meyer

 http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/hermetic/cal_stud/cal_art.htm

The Gregorian Reform

The average length of a year in the Julian Calendar [the calendar put in place by Julius Caesar]  is 365.25 days (one additional day being added every four years). The length of the year in the Julian Calendar exceeds the length of the mean solar year (365.24219 mean solar days to five decimal places) by 11.2 minutes. This error accumulates so that after 128 years the calendar is out of sync with the equinoxes and solstices by one day. Thus as the centuries passed the Julian Calendar became increasingly inaccurate with respect to the seasons. This was especially troubling to the Christian Church because it affected the determination of the date of Easter, which, by the 16th Century, was well on the way to slipping into Summer.

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Links to Collaborative Genealogy Sites

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In the interest of seeing that our family tree, the actual genealogical “who, when, and where” is preserved, I have placed some of the research that went into this blog on five websites, four of which actually aim to piece together, person by person, a single family tree for everyone. Taken literally, that is wildly ambitious, not to mention completely impractical, but the effort alone has already produced, flaws and shortcomings notwithstanding, a very special body of research.

These “collaborative” genealogy sites are Geni, WikiTree, WeRelate, and FamilySearch. Each is a little different.

For example, Geni and WikiTree make room for all relatives including living people and then add privacy controls. WeRelate, meanwhile, has decided to forego information on living people and just focus on the near past. Geni makes little use of sources or documentation, but WikiTree and especially WeRelate strive, with varying success, to back up all assertions with primary documents. There are plenty of other differences, but that’s the gist of it.

The main point is that putting the information here means it will survive even in generations when no one inherits an interest in family history– something I see as increasingly  likely.

Here are some jumping off points, categorized first by site, and then by a few key relatives…

 

Geni:

 

 

WikiTree:

 

 

WeRelate:

 

 

FamilySearch:

 

 

Finally, I said there are five sites. The fifth is Ancestry.com, which somewhat sadly, has a paywall and curious people cannot simply click over to peruse the material at will. You can see it without a financial outlay, but to do so you’ll have to email me or Elisha Lee to be put on a list of invitees. Sorry, I didn’t make up those rules. If you are already on Ancestry, you can search for our tree which is called Kinsmen and Kinswomen (revised and sourced). [18,000 relatives and counting.] On the plus side, looking for a silver lining, the highly commercial aspect of Ancestry has paid huge dividends in making a vast trove of documents available online, including – in most cases – photocopies of originals. This includes birth certificates, marriage entries in the parish register, passport applications, draft registrations, VA records, medical examiners’ notes, high school yearbooks, biographical vignettes, and on and on. People can also share multiple digital copies of rare family photos.  There really is nothing like it for primary research.

At some point in the distant future, I’ll figure out how to put a version of our tree here, on this site, with measures in place to protect people’s privacy, but until then, the organizations above will have to suffice.