Extended Family

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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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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Susanna Vasilievna Anisimoff Baeff Lawrence, c.1913-1949

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At some point, in the near future, I’m going to do a post on the amazing Capt. Richard Lawrence, M.D. (1912-2000), or Richard Lawrence, Jr., as he was sometimes known, or simply, Cousin Dick. The man deserves as much.

In the meantime, there is this, almost as an aside: one small piece of the larger puzzle of his life, with the curious property that the closer one looks, the more the “piece” becomes a puzzle in its own right.

Roughly two years ago, I happened to be emailing with Robert Cutler, who, suffice to say, understands the (not-quite-lost) art of letter writing. He had embarked on a long and delightful tangent concerning Cousin Dick, whom at that point I had barely heard of, when, in the course of his excursion, he mentioned almost as an afterthought that before attending medical school, Richard Lawrence had spent a period of time in China, and while there, had met a Russian woman whom he married in Shanghai and brought back to America.

(Frankly, he said a good deal more than that, but this medium – which is obviously public –  has its limits.)

He went on to describe some of Dick’s better known activities in WWII, which as I said, I’ll get to someday, but, long after I’d finished reading, my mind kept going back to this Russian woman; China in the late ’30s; the circumstances of their meeting, and their exit; and what had really been going on?

Suffice to say, Robert had hooked me. I had to learn more, but, the more I learned, well, the more I realized I didn’t know, and– you get the idea.

Puzzles within puzzles.

This is part of what I found…

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