Since March is Women’s History Month, I thought I’d participate in the Ancestral Woman Challenge by sharing some stories about my female relatives. Most of them are unknown women, but they are the reason I exist, and for that reason alone, deserve celebrating.
NANCY BROWN
1842-1929
My older brother and I both make our living as writers. Given that, we’ve often wondered how it came to be that two people from a small town in Massachusetts inherited such strong creative genes.
Did we inherit our creativity from our mother, who could predict the plot of a tv show within five minutes of the theme song? Or maybe it was Grandma Viola, she of the wild family stories? Lord knows, she had an imagination. Or was it even in our family tree? After all, if we’re related to John and Priscilla Alden then Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a (very) distant cousin.
As it turns out, the answer lay in an old Army trunk my parents kept in the basement. There, among the scrapbooks and old photos, I found a small, handmade booklet entitled The Poems of Nancy A. Sanford.
My great, great, grandmother, Nancy Brown Sanford was born to Harvey and Lucina Brown in 1842 on the Old Brown Farm in Whitingham, Vermont. She was a true New Englander, with both her father’s and mother’s family trees stretching back to the Puritan migration. (Lucina was a Mayflower descendant, while Harvey’s family arrived a decade later.)
She died in 1929 at the age of 87 from pneumonia, which she developed 36 hours after attending the Stamford, VT grange meeting . Her obituary called her a “woman of kindly instincts, always ready to assist in time of trouble,” whose “place in the community will be difficult to fill.”
The book of poems I discovered provides a fascinating look into life in Whitingham, VT. She wrote poems for people’s birthdays, anniversaries, and church socials. She wrote verse about Temperance for the Deerfield Valley Times, and recited a poem of Thanksgiving at Sunday service. She even wrote a cheeky history of Stamford, VT incorporating the names of the founding families.
My favorite of all of them is the poem she wrote for herself on her 50th birthday which includes the verse:
A husband and five children have been mine
Given by love’s hand divine
The first I’ve often failed to please
And been to him a drag and tease
But if he understood me better
He’d take the spirit, not the letter.
The poem continues with references to babies who died young and relatives who fought in the Civil War.
I have a photograph of Nancy hanging in my house. I discovered it at an antique store in Ohio, of all places. I like to think this wasn’t an accident, but that Nancy was letting me know she’s glad to see the writing gene carried on.
She’s my muse.
