Faded Autographs

A LATE 19th CENTURY AUTOGRAPH ALBUM
FILLED WITH SENTIMENTS,
ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

The Autograph Book of my great - grandmother
Sarah Elisabeth Hartman Lindsey (1856 - 1937),
filled in as she traveled west in 1886 - 1894,
from Indiana to Illinois to Nebraska

The book is embellished with drawings and quotations from
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.
Black were her eyes as the berry
that grows on the thorn by the wayside,
Black, yet how softly they gleamed
beneath the brown shade of her tresses!

Somewhat apart from the village,
and nearer the Basin of Minas,
Benedict Bellefontaine,
the wealthiest farmer of Grand-Pré,
Dwelt on his goodly acres:
and with him, directing his household,
Gentle Evangeline lived . . .

Oft on autumnal eves, when without
in the gathering darkness
Bursting with light seemed the smithy,
through every cranny and crevice . . .

Bright rose the sun next day;
and all the flowers of the garden
Bathed his shining feet with their tears,
and anointed his tresses
With the delicious balm that they bore
in their vases of crystal.

Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light;
and the landscape
Lay as if new-created in all the freshness of childhood.
Peace seemed to reign upon earth . . .

The book contains two dozen or so autographs.
Here are a couple of my favorites:

I don't know who Lillie Ely was to Sarah,
but I love what she wrote:

"In memory's basket
drop one pearl for me."

On the other hand, this signature I know well!
It is that of my great-grandfather,
Sarah's husband, James Sankey Lindsey.
In the happier times, it was his way
to call her "Sallie" and hers to call him "Jimmie."

"Sallie
It seems so strange and it
makes me laugh to think that
you want MY authograph

Jas. S Lindsey
Sheldon, Ill
July 2, 1886

Reading these, and so many other, quaint inscriptions, I could hear a soundtrack of golden oldies from my own coming of age: autographs, photographs, memories, traces. Though Sarah herself would have never heard these nostalgic tunes, she surely had other evocative melodies floating through her memory as she perused the treasured messages in this keepsake album that she saved all of her life and passed down to my mother.

Photographs and Memories
[1974]

Photographs and memories
Christmas cards you sent to me
All that I have are these
To remember you

Memories that come at night
Take me to another time
Back to a happier day
When I called you mine

But we sure had a good time
When we started way back when
Morning walks and bedroom talks
Oh how I loved you then

Summer skies and lullabies
Nights we couldn't say good-bye
And of all of the things that we knew
Not a dream survived

Photographs and memories
All the love you gave to me
Somehow it just can't be true
That's all I've left of you

But we sure had a good time
When we started way back when
Morning walks and bedroom talks
Oh how I loved you then

Music & lyrics by Jim Croce (1943 – 1973)

Traces
[1969]

Faded photographs, covered now with lines and creases
Tickets torn in half, memories in bits and pieces
Traces of love, long ago that didn't work out right
Traces of love

Ribbons from her hair, souvenirs of days together
(Things we used to share, souvenirs of days together)
The ring she used to wear, pages from an old love letter
Traces of love, long ago that didn't work out right
Traces of love, with me tonight

I close my eyes and say a prayer
That in her heart, she'll find a trace of love still there
Somewhere

Traces of hope in the night that she'll come back and dry
These traces of tears from my eyes

Music & lyrics by Buddy Buie, J. R. Cobb, Emory Gordy Jr. Performed by Classics IV

*****************

Thanks to my cousin Cindy,
who helps me keep track of
everything we know about Sarah today,
including her papers, photographs, and artifacts.

Here we are: Cindy & Kitti, second cousins, once removed.
Sarah's great - great- granddaughter & great - granddaughter:

Portrait of Sarah, along with snapshot of Kitti & Cindy

“And it is surely astounding to reflect that not once in the three billion years since life began has your personal line of descent been broken. For you to be here now, every one of your ancestors had to successfully pass on its genetic material to a new generation before being snuffed out or otherwise sidetracked from the procreative process. That's quite a chain of success.”

from The Body: A Guide for Occupants (p 7)

*****************
“Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.”

from A Short History of Nearly Everything

both by Bill Bryson

Next Fortnightly Post
Thursday, July 14th

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THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
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