When Eliza Jones, a former slave living in South Carolina, went to register for a savings account in 1871, she couldn’t sign her name for identification, nor could the bank afford to take a picture of her. But the bank wanted some way to distinguish Eliza from other would-be claimants.
Maybe your third great-grandfather insulted Abraham Lincoln or your great-grandma was the first woman to vote in her town. You’ve heard tales that your grandma’s sister was J. Edgar Hoover’s secretary or her bassist brother used to jam with Miles Davis. What do you do when you uncover a great family story that you know just needs to be told?
Mamie Doud Eisenhower got a lot of press as the wife of a president, but she wanted none of it. When a thoroughly-modern reporter asked what her aspirations had been as a 20th-century female, Mamie replied: “I was [Ike’s] wife, John’s mother, and the children’s grandmother.
My family tree seems to have more than its share of naughty daughters. Maybes it’s a head-strong, stubborn, or a willful gene that runs rampant in our DNA.
For me, family history has always been more than names, dates, and places, so trying to figure out what it was that naughty daughters did or didn’t do that caused them to be written out of wills is right up my alley.
When I ask members of the local scout troop if anybody has his Genealogy Merit Badge, I get groans and complaints. “Dude, that took so long” seems to be the general consensus. But when I ask what they found out, the tone changes. Riley learned how his family came over from Sweden and says that asking questions “makes your family more interesting.
Amelia Earhart. Queen Elizabeth. Jane Austen. Marie Curie. We’ve all heard the names. And we probably even remember their stories. Here’s a tribute to all the women whose names we don’t know but whose impact on history has been immeasurable.
1473–1458 B.C.
