-
Grave stone, paid in full
My four-greats grandmother, Margaret Sigler Stoneroad (last written about as the subject of an acrostic urging her to remain chaste), died on May 29, 1876, with burial in her home in Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. On August 8, 1876, her son-in-law, John Lyon Patterson (husband of Ellie Stoneroad Patterson) paid $38 for a set of gravestones for Margaret’s grave to Charles Stratford Jr. Stratford owned and operated Mount Union Marble Works and Lewistown Marble Works, a business he carried on from his father, Charles Stratford Sr., a marble cutter born in 1812 in Cheltenham, England.
-
Will McDowell, RIP
Juniata County’s one and only museum is the Tuscarora Academy, the lone surviving building of a boarding school in the tiny village of Academia. Nearby the Tuscarora Academy was the Tuscarora Female Seminary, a boarding school for girls owned by my four-greats grandfather, Alexander Patterson. In an envelope addressed to G.P. Henry (Grace Patterson, my great great grandmother) were, as the label read, “old papers”– the will of Margaret Sigler, Ellie Stoneroad’s mother and Grace’s grandmother, and this handwritten tribute to William McDowell, a Tuscarora Academy student who died on September 20, 1845. The poem was written by Henry Wolf, “for the use of John Patterson.” There were plenty of John…
-
Miss Margaret Sigler
Tucked among the many pieces of correspondence, envelopes, notes–and locks of hair–of my three-greats grandmother, Ellie Stoneroad Patterson, is this beautifully lettered acrostic. The poem spells out the name of Ellie’s mother Margaret Sigler. No author is listed, but assuming Margaret wrote it about herself and she did so while she was Miss Sigler and not Mrs. Stoneroad, the paper would predate 1835–the year of birth of Margaret’s first child, daughter Emeline. Many are the charming virtues of a lovely maid; In all her beauties there is no gloomy shade, Since the fair and lovely train, with spirits glow, So shall their modest actions and deportments show. Many are the direful modes…