Scrap Day Sunday

Courtesy of the Bates County Museum

Today's scrap is an actual scrap.  It's a large scrap of silk brocade  with a note sewn on it that reads;

 " This Silk was purchased in England in 1744 for a travelling dress."
 Mrs. S. Baldwin
Blue Springs

Mrs. S. Baldwin was Mary (Ingraham) Baldwin who was living in Blue Springs, Gage, NE at the time.  

This scrap of fabric was donated to the Bates County Museum, along with the silk bag that I featured in an earlier post, by my great great grandmother Maud (VanSant) Grimes.  We all just called her "Granny" and still do to this day.  Granny loved to quilt.  When she wasn't helping on the farm or raising her eight children, she was piecing quilts.  So it makes sense that she would have held on to this piece of fabric.  But who was the travelling dress made for?

The note on the fabric was written by Mary (Ingraham) Baldwin so I started there.  It would have either came down through her or her husband, Samuel Baldwin.  I had done extensive research on Mary's line as it is my Mayflower line and the wording of the note struck a bell.  After some digging (ok, a lot of digging) through my notes I came upon some photocopied pages of a book entitled Puritans, Pioneers & Planters An Ingraham-Abbott-Wardwell-Culver-Burbank Genealogy written by Norma Quarles Hare.  In the preface of the book, Mrs. Hare describes her and her mother going through a box of possessions that belonged to her great grandmother, Delia Balis (Ingraham) Blakemore.  In this box they found a scrap of red, silk brocade fabric that matched a square in a crazy quilt that Delia had made and stitched the year 1744 into.    Attached to this fabric was a note in her great grandmother's handwriting that read:

  "This silk was purchased in England for a travelling dress for Mrs. Wardwell, nee Swan".  

Bingo!  What are the chances of two scraps of fabric owned by two Ingraham descendants each of which contains a note with almost identical wording not being from the same dress?  I'm pretty sure I have located the original owner of the dress from whence the fabric came.  Wait for it........ Hannah (Swan) Wardwell daughter of Ebenezer and Margaret (Woodbury) Swan and wife of  Capt. John Wardwell all of Bristol, RI.  Capt. John Wardwell was the son of John and Phebe (Howland) Wardwell.  I do not believe however that the fabric was bought in 1744 as my 4th great grandmother stated in the note.  The year 1744 is actually the date of Hannah's birth.  So I'm thinking that there was a little mix-up along the way and the year 1744 was incorrectly listed as the date of the purchase of the fabric instead of the date of Hannah's births.
  

 

A Conundrum of Sorts

For the past two years I have been working tirelessly to complete my application to The General Society of Mayflower Descendants.  I filled out the preliminary application.  I got a positive answer from the State Historian who informed me of the application process and the types of documentation that would be needed.  Generation one (John Howland) through generation seven (Thomas Swan Ingraham) had already been accepted by the Society. That left generations 8-14 for me to prove.  I was off and running!  It was that generation 8 that was giving me problems.  Mary (Ingraham) Baldwin, daughter of Thomas Swan and Julia (Balis) Ingraham.  I just wasn't having any luck finding the primary (or secondary for that matter) documents that I needed.    I sent off for death certificates.  I searched high and low for a missing family bible.  I found the bloody thing too, I might add! I sent out emails to the four corners of the world.  I virtually stalked anyone that could help me with my search.  And now it has all come together.  I can prove my case.  I am a descendant of four passenger of the Mayflower. John Howland and his wife Elizabeth Tilley and Elizabeth's parents John and Joan (Hurst) Tilley. 

So what's my conundrum you ask?  Well, now that I have pulled all this information together and put in all the hours of research, I don't really know that I want to finalize my application.  I don't need a certificate to tell me my heritage.  Sure, it would make it official, but do I really need a society to tell me who I am?  Joining would also preserve my research for posterity and make it easier for my descendants to join.  But then again, it's my research.  I've tracked down the original documents and done the legwork.  If  I join, am I robbing future generations of the joy of tracking down who they are? 

 I still haven't decided one way or the other.  I might make it official or I might not.  That's my prerogative.  For me it was all the thrill of the hunt. All that time digging and analyzing and creeping around in dark, dank basements made it worth it.  Not to mention all the wonderful people I have met along the way!  I will let my nieces and nephew know their ties to the beginning of this country.  I want them to own their heritage.  I'm just not sure if I want to hand them the proof.  I think they can become little researchers themselves.