Grace

Over the past year, off and on, I’ve been positing artifacts I discovered after my grandfather’s death in December 2013. These are old family papers, and while I have a varied collection, most of the collection relates back to Ellie Stoneroad Patterson, a name I never tire of typing. Ellie was my great-great-great grandmother, and she seems to have, from an early age, put many thoughts and observations to paper. She saved materials relating to both her forebears and the forebears of her husband, John Lyon Patterson.

The real credit for saving this collection belongs to Grace Patterson Henry, Ellie’s daughter and my great-great grandmother. I’ve seen explanatory notes written on papers and photos–“my mother,” “my grandmother,” and so forth. Grace seemed to want to keep items in order and explain them for future generations. And so I’m grateful for Grace’s wise decision to keep these items and provide at least a minimal level interpretation, when so many others might’ve thought them trash and discarded them.

Another thing saving these papers for my eventual discovery is that the family didn’t move much. My mother grew up in the farmhouse that Grace and her husband Harvey had made their own in the early 1900s. Grace lived with her grandson’s young family for the final years of her life, a situation that must’ve been odd for an old lady. Grandson, granddaughter-in-law, and three grandkids in the house in her waning years? How strange that must’ve been. My grandfather stayed in the house until the mid 1990s, and even then, he only moved a yard away, to a house built in the old farmhouse’s backyard. The papers didn’t have a long trip.

The papers made their longest ever trip just last year, when they left Pennsylvania, their home for more than a century in many cases, bound for my house in Ohio. And here they are now, being discovered by a new generation and shared with whoever wants to see them.

This is the lady, Grace Patterson Henry, born 1873 and died 1958, in the final decade of her life. Thanks, old lady, for keeping the history alive.