Hey Lydia, Guess Who Likes You!

Each year (usually around Valentine's Day) elementary-school students in Haverhill, Mass., pass on a message from a former pupil.

Yesterday morning the students descended on the historic Walnut Cemetery and remembered schoolboy emotions that ran through the heart of Haverhill's favorite son, John Greenleaf Whittier, when he was around their age.

It has become a tradition in Haverhill with local students gathering around the gravestone of Lydia Ayer to recite a poem by Whittier recalling his childhood sweetheart and a moment following a school spelling bee when she confesses, "I'm sorry that I spelt the word: I hate to go above you, because — the brown eyes lower fell — because, you see, I love you!" [Link]

Poetry So Bad It's Criminal

Workers found a tombstone in the basement of the courthouse in Bangor, Maine, for Isaac Cobb, who died Sept. 7, 1874, at age 72. A second epitaph was written on the back—presumably by inmates at the courthouse jail.

It appears to have been printed in black paint on the back of the headstone.

Titled, "Pretty Boy Floyd Redmond," the first two verses read:

"Beneath this sod so cold and deep,

Lies the once bold Floyd R,

Now, the meek and dirty creep.

He came to our town,

His motto to "do or die,"

But now he’s stocking shelves,

It makes you wonder why." [Link]

I actually know Isaac Cobb. He was born in the same town I was, and his mother was a Dunham—a distant cousin of mine. I have no known connection to "Pretty Boy Floyd."

[Thanks, Nancy!]

The First Leaves of Grass

Janice of Cow Hampshire emailed me about an unusual research request she received. Researchers at the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review are compiling a census of extant copies of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. One of the copies was described as follows:

Bookplate from Newton Hall, Cambridge on front pasted-down endpaper; Inscriptions on front free endpaper: "Anson G.P. Segur Feb 13th 1856", "Bought by A.C. Smith".

Janice had little trouble assembling an impressive dossier on Anson G. P. Segur (there have been surprisingly few men of that name), but A. C. Smith remains a mystery.

The 1900 census for Brooklyn, N.Y., gives Anson's birth date as February 1839, so the book could have been a gift on his 17th birthday. But who was A.C. Smith? Was he the original purchaser (as the Whitman researchers assume), or did he purchase the book from Anson? If the latter, I wonder if he was Albridge Clinton Smith, in 1880 a lawyer in Dover, New Jersey—the same town where Anson was mayor, 1871-1873.

Feel free to find evidence to support or demolish my theory.

Graven Imagery

Someone calling himself Nick Beef (not his real name) is sticking up DieKus—haikus made from images of headstones—around New York City.

[Photo credit: piro mania by Joe Holmes]
[via MetaFilter]

The Clerical Hogreeve

Janice at Cow Hampshire yesterday defined "hog reeve" for her readers. This was a job with curious qualifications, traditionally reserved for those men who had taken wives in the year previous. In this poem, copied in the Middlesex Gazette of Sept. 16, 1819, one officeholder makes the misogynist townsmen the butt of their own joke.

THE CLERICAL HOGREEVE

It happened in a certain place,
Not overstock'd with grace,
A steady cheerful parson preach'd and pray'd,
And had his salary paid,
For forty years; but with no great effect,
Except that vice was somewhat check'd,
And virtue aided some, and piety,
For the well being of society.
But still the flock, in matters of opinion,
Knew not a Calvinist, from an Armenian,
Each jogg'd along, and labor'd on his farm,
And thus did much more good than harm.

The forty years expir'd—so did his wife,
Whom he had wedded in the bloom of life,
And so the loss of her,
Made him, of course, a widower.
Feeling that 'twas "not good to be alone,"
He chose another "bone,"
Ere long to grace the ministerial pew,
And round the parsonage to tew.

Now 'tis the custom of the town,
If parson, doctor, 'squire or clown,
Gets married, at March meeting he will hear,
That he's appointed hogreeve, for the year.
So far'd it with our priest, so witty,
Who soon was waited on by the committee,
Who told him, that the voice
Of all the town had made the above said choice.

The parson smil'd and said "I am no novice;
Full forty years I've been in the same office,
In this appointment, all that's new
Is four legg'd hogs to drive instead of two."

INS Seeks to Identify, Deport Vandals

From the San Francisco (Calif.) Chronicle:

ANGEL ISLAND
Immigrants left their marks
Poems were carved into the Bay Area's detention barracks

Jim Doyle, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, October 1, 2005

Hundreds of heartfelt poems were carved into the walls by those detained at Angel Island's Immigration Station during an era when it was U.S. government policy to drastically limit the number of Chinese and Asian immigrants.

The poems, a long-forgotten chapter of Bay Area history, speak of immigrant desires, fears, anger and longing for a better life.

"I wish I could travel on a cloud far away, reunite with my wife and son," says a poem composed of Chinese characters and carved into the barracks' wall. "When the moonlight shines on me alone, the night seems even longer."

[snip]

[Read the whole story]

Top Five Poems for Genealogists

5. Emily Dickinson, "I died for beauty. . ." It always makes me want to recommend techniques for cleaning tombstones.

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, — the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

4. Elizabeth Jennings, In Memory of Anyone Unknown to Me. A beautiful poem, but the author obviously lacks the curiosity to make a good genealogist.

At this particular time I have no one
Particular person to grieve for, though there must
Be many, many unknown ones going to dust
Slowly, not remembered for what they have done
Or left undone. For these, then, I will grieve
Being impartial, unable to deceive.

How they lived, or died, is quite unknown,
And, by that fact gives my grief purity—
An important person quite apart from me
Or one obscure who drifted down alone.
Both or all I remember, have a place.
For these I never encountered face to face.

Sentiment will creep in. I cast it out
Wishing to give these classical repose,
No epitaph, no poppy and no rose
From me, and certainly no wish to learn about
The way they lived or died. In earth or fire
They are gone. Simply because they were human, I admire.

3. Walt Whitman, With Antecedents, from Leaves of Grass. Not his best work, but certainly relevant.

[Excerpted]
WITH antecedents;
With my fathers and mothers, and the accumulations of past ages;
With all which, had it not been, I would not now be here, as I am:

                .       .       .

With the small shores we look back to from our own large and present shores;
With countless years drawing themselves onward, and arrived at these years;
You and Me arrived—America arrived, and making this year;
This year! sending itself ahead countless years to come.

2. Edgar Lee Masters, Cassius Hueffer, part of his Spoon River Anthology, a collection of free verse epitaphs contributed by the deceased. It was difficult to choose just one.

They have Chiseled on my stone the words:
'His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.'
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
'Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life,
In the which he was slain.'
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!

1. Robert Frost, The Generations of Men. He describes well a typical family reunion in New England. (I'll pass up the chance to include in this list his infamous epitaph, "Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me.")

[Excerpted]
Someone had literally run to earth
In an old cellar hole in a by-road
The origin of all the family there.
Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe
That now not all the houses left in town
Made shift to shelter them without the help
Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.

Some Cockroach Wisdom to Parse

From Don Marquis' "a roach of the taverns" (from archy and mehitabel (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1927)):

                                  i
have often noticed that
ancestors never boast
of the descendants who boast
of ancestors i would
rather start a family than
finish one blood will tell but often
it tells too much