Middle-class at Heart (Part I)

“The baby is sick. He has been sick a long time. He cries a lot and Pa sometimes spanks him to make him be good. When he sits in his high-chair he can’t hold up his head  . . . Ma says she doesn’t have time to take care of him and anyway she is too busy to eat herself so she has no milk for the baby.”

So wrote Gertrude Willson in her diary in upper New York State during the mid-1880s. That starving baby grew up to be a school principal in New York City, although he died at age 56 because of his early malnutrition. Gertrude went to normal school and became a teacher. Her cousin became a school principal, then turned Methodist and became a circuit-riding preacher in Nebraska, and later was an Episcopal priest.

However poor her family was, Gertrude Willson’s family had pluck and determination and overcame odds.

A couple of months ago I asked readers to send me stories about their family history. I published one of them, by David Brook, and plan to publish the story of Gertrude Willson, a cousin of John Willson, in a future post.

The people who sent me stories are well-educated professionals. If there is one thing that has struck me about their family stories, it is how “middle class” they are, even going way back. That’s true of my family, too. By middle-class I mean that they worked hard, out of duty as much as necessity; they expected their children to do so, too; and they valued education.

Most of the families came from Europe, two from the Austro-Hungarian empire. For example, Tom Grennes’s grandfather, Joseph Reiner, lived in Krakow, Poland (which was part of Austria from 1773 until 1918). After a dispute with his well-off family, Joseph joined the Austrian army, where he served for six years. He left for America in 1912 and never returned to Austria, even though he was ordered to return to military duty after World War I broke out. His refusal to return resulted in his being listed as a deserter in Austrian military records.

Tom says that the rest of his family were peasants. Maybe so, but his grandparents belonged to a German-language Lutheran church that had a German-language day school.

Michael Sanera’s half-uncle (also named Michael) was born around 1900 in Transylvania, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He wrote a diary of his experiences. When he was a child his grandparents took care of him because his mother had gone to the United States to get away from an abusive marriage. When she remarried, she sent for Michael, who at age 9 or so sailed to Ellis Island and then took a train to Homestead, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. His new stepfather was a machinist for a steel mill; Michael went to night school and became an engineer.

In the 1850s, David Brook’s great-great-grandfather came from the German Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, where, as David wrote, there was little future. “An almost feudal aristocracy held all the land, power, and opportunity.” When Ludwig “Louis” Wellendorf arrived in the United States he too worked at a steel mill.

Part of my family came from Germany, specifically Saxony, in the 1830s. They belonged to a Lutheran church in St. Louis. The founders wrote in their charter that their church would have no connection with any government, as government control of churches had rankled them in Germany.

Not everyone in my small collection of stories came from the Continent. Jim Smith’s known family history begins with Cicely Reynolds, a young orphan who immigrated to Jamestown in 1610, three years after the colony was founded. Cicely married four times and became very wealthy. She is known to posterity for being the defendant in the nation’s first breach-of-promise suit. (She denied that she had accepted the Rev. Grivell Pooley’s proposal of marriage; the suit didn’t get very far because Pooley died, possibly by an attack from Indians.)

The very middle-class American habit of litigation was alive and well as the nation’s history began.

“Middle-Class at Heart, Part II” can be found here.

Image from Pixabay.