This is Mary Melissa. She was born 160 years ago today (22 Nov 1859), and she’s my Great Great Great Grandmother. These are (crops of) the photos I have of her. At least three of them were most likely taken the same day, and four of them have her wearing the same blouse. But I am still so happy to have them. I’ve been searching for who her parents are almost since I put together who she even was.
She’s listed in a genealogical book published during her lifetime, in 1931, that traces her from a man who came here from Germany in the 1700s. (The book is dedicated to tracing his family. I found it because his name is Mary Melissa’s maiden name. She’s listed as the daughter of an Elizabeth and a blank. Mary Melissa carried her mother’s maiden name as her own and she and her mother both eventually married men with the same last name (brothers with a span of 25 years between them, if the records I’ve found and my guess is right). MM is in the book listed once as the daughter of Elizabeth and then the next time we see Elizabeth she’s listed with some blanks as the grandmother of MM’s children, including my Great Great Grandmother. I don’t know what Elizabeth’s circumstance was, but several kinds could leave her with a child she gave her maiden name to. Regardless, it was something they didn’t want listed transparently, apparently.
The family went through some effort to conceal Mary Melissa’s origins. She was married off a little more than a month after she turned 15, on December 31st. The marriage was announced in an obscure local paper the following October. She was born and lived in a time between mandates for documentation for life events, so in addition to hoping to see parents listed on that very obscure wedding announcement in the main family history library in the county, I’m headed to the county seat’s court soon to see what their birth records look like prior to 1906 to see if there’s something that claims Mary Melissa.
Mary Melissa named my Great Great Grandmother after her mother, Elizabeth. She named another daughter, Margaret, after the grandmother she and Elizabeth lived with when she was a child (thanks, census!). One of her sons got a family nickname as his middle name. Most of her fifteen children have some kind of specific name connected to the people in the book. She’s absolutely connected to this family. I don’t know who her father is. There’s a suspicion it is the man Elizabeth eventually married after his first wife died, but I haven’t found anything that proves it in a hard documentation kind of way.
Mary Melissa particularly affects me for some reason. There are other speed bumps and questionable loops on the trip through this, there are stories cut tragically short, but hers is the one that obsesses me. I think about things might have been like for her. Was she told her father had died in the Civil War when she was old enough to wonder? Did they know and tell her? Every census has her living somewhere else. Was it really her idea to get married so soon? She was educated until the 8th grade and then kept house and had children until she couldn’t anymore. Several of her children died before her. Every record I can find says she was an only child. She made it to 85 years old.
I like anniversaries and significant dates and such, and Mary Melissa has been something I’ve talked about or thought about almost daily since this past summer, so I felt like screaming into the void about her on her birthday. Maybe next year I’ll have uncovered some things that cement her where she belongs.
