Posted on by Ellen Roussel

Ode to Eliza Ridgely

Today, I finished transcribing the last of the minutes recorded by Eliza Ridgely as Secretary; what a bittersweet moment in time this was for me.

Despite my original chagrin with Ridgely’s style of note-taking, I now feel as though I have learned and grown with Eliza for two seasons of the Woman’s Literary Club’s existence, and truly am sad to see her go.

Eliza’s work was characterized by a surprising lack of detail for most of the meetings’ happenings. With her, there was only a vague allusion to what events might have transpired during the actual meetings. Nonetheless, it is Eliza Ridgely who has painted the only picture of the Woman’s Literary Club that I have ever known.

At the end of the second season, Ridgely’s position was taken over by Lydia Crane, who was much less willing to do the amount of work that Eliza put into her position as Secretary. According to Crane, her stipulation for accepting the nomination as Secretary was that she would only be the Recording Secretary during the meetings, and not Corresponding and Recording Secretary as Eliza had been. This leads me to conclude that Eliza Ridgely went above and beyond for the Club. Way to go, girl.

What is mysterious to me, is why Eliza Ridgely refused to accept her nomination as Secretary in the third year of the Club’s existence. During the second season, Eliza began missing more and more meetings, with Lydia Crane filling in for her, for undisclosed reasons. I can only speculate as to why Eliza would have missed so many meetings and why she did not feel it within her ability to remain Secretary, while preferring to be a member of the Executive Board.

All I can say is that, Eliza, it was a pleasure getting to know you through your words and your writing and your descriptions (or lackthereof) over the past two seasons.

Posted on by Katie Kazmierski · 2 Comments

Lydia Crane: Uncovering a Legacy and a Grave

As the rest of the team knows, Lydia Crane, the Club’s dedicated Recording Secretary for over 15 years, has held a special place in my heart over the course of our transcribing. There’s something about her tireless devotion to the Club and her attention to detail in recording minutes. Every detail, that is, other than clues to who she was herself.

I’ve been looking more into Lydia and seeing what I could find about her. I was thrilled when Sydney found her memorial on Find a Grave, which tells me she was born on July 22, 1833 (happy 184th birthday, Lydia!), and died May 4, 1916. This also showed me who her father was, William Crane. Crane founded Richmond African Baptist Missionary Society in 1815, opposed slavery, but also did not call himself an abolitionist, as he criticized them as harshly as he did secessionists. I’ll probably write more about him later, as he was a fascinating figure.

And of course, endless information is available about him, while nearly nothing can be found about Miss Lydia Crane.

Yesterday, when we visited Green Mount Cemetery I was particularly excited to find her grave. We had the location of William Crane’s grave from findagrave.com, and I was confident that Lydia would be right there with him.

The grave of William Crane (1790-1866), father of Lydia Crane (1833-1916).

But, as Sydney mentioned, we couldn’t find her. Or maybe we did, but her grave is weathered arguably beyond recovery.

What might be Lydia Crane’s grave. The writing is completely illegible, though we’re pretty sure we can make out a ‘Crane’ in the top right corner. It’s located in the Crane family plot at Green Mount Cemetery.

I was disappointed, to say the least. I tried fiddling with that photo over and over again in Photoshop, and so far this is the best I could do:

The black and white and dark contrast makes the ‘Crane’ a tiny bit easier to decipher, but even then it’s a shot in the dark. I wont give up on this though–I’ve already asked my dad, a photographer, to come with me to the cemetery with his DSLR camera and off-camera flash, which supposedly will help make the shadows work more in our favor to decipher the inscription. I’d also like to do an etching.

I might seem crazy for the lengths I’m going to to try to uncover Miss Crane’s memorial, especially considering we already do know her first name along with her birth and death dates, which is more than we know about many of the Club’s women. But it troubles me that someone as vital to the Club’s history as her could nearly disappear herself from history. A woman with such detailed accounts of something should at least have a legible gravestone.

Sydney suggested I also contact the woman who published Lydia’s memorial on Find a Grave, which I did this afternoon. Her profile on the site boasts an astonishing 992 memorials added to the database, almost 100 of them with the surname ‘Crane’. I’m interested to know what her connection with the Crane family is, and if all 100 of these Cranes, spanning various generations and locations, might be her ancestors or simply people she’s intrigued in. Lydia Crane could just be a name to her, or maybe she knows something more.

 

Posted on by Sydney Johnson

Update to Names

As my last posts have shown, it has been quite the challenge to try to find who some of these women really are. Notably the married women. I was particularly surprised to find that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall, the long lasting president of the Club, was one of these people that was almost impossible to find.

Or so it seemed.

With the help of Hunter we were able to figure out that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall is ACTUALLY Mrs. Letitia Humphreys Yonge Wrenshall. It is definitely a mouthful but also really exciting to find out another lady’s real name.

Her husband, John C. Wrenshall was actually a captain in the Confederate army. John and Letitia were wed November 22, 1866 in Savannah, Georgia.

Another thing to add to the search is the information that we found while on our tour of the Green Mount Cemetery. All of the team was present for our search which we feared might be fruitless from the get-go. Fortunately we were able to find more than we thought. We were able to find the graves of Miss Caroline Barnett (1871-1957), Miss Virginia Woodword Cloud (d. 1938), Miss Eveline Early (1868-1933) and Mrs. John D. Early (otherwise known as Maud Graham Early 1842-1905), Mrs. Charles W. Lord (otherwise known as Alice Emma Lord 1848-1930), Mrs. William M. Powell (otherwise known as Emma B. Powell 1852-1952), and Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull (otherwise known as Francese Litchfield Turnbull 1844-1927).

Just being able to figure out a few more of these names and years keeps the search going. Another interesting thing that we found was that Sidney Lanier’s grave was in the same plot as the Turnbull’s plot. There was the grave for Sidney Lanier but not for Mrs. Sidney Lanier who was a honorary member of the club. We did not know of a connection between the Laniers and the Turnbulls, but we are aware that Mrs. Turnbull was always a big fan of Sidney Lanier and on her grave is a quote of his.

We also are fairly sure that we found the grave of Lydia Crane since we were able to find most of her family but were unable to determine which one was hers due to the weathering of the tombstones. But I know that Katie is going to want to do more hunting to find the truth.

Posted on by Sydney Johnson

Names and Dates: Connecting the dots

Diving into discovering who the women of the Club are has come with some rewards, and many challenges. For the past few weeks now I have been in charge of figuring out who was in the Club when and where they lived. Thanks to the incredible record-keeping in the early years that is not a difficult task. Much of the same information overlaps in different notebooks. Essentially, from 1980 to 1916 we have an almost complete record of who the members in the Club and also who the board of management was. However, these are just names and nothing more. My next task was to try to figure who these women were or at least try to find some of their real names—not their husbands names.

Instead of trying to find information about over a hundred women, we thought it would be best to start small, and higher up, with the board of management. This board includes an average of twelve women. One president, two vice presidents, a recording secretary, a corresponding secretary, a treasurer, and six members of the board. These are the women that help run and decide the direction of the club. Having the lists of the board from year to year all in one place can also help explain changes in the dynamic of the club. For example, Hunter has been transcribing the minutes for Fall of 1903 where Lydia Crane was recording the minutes. In the middle of a meeting the hand-writing changes indicating that Miss Crane is not writing anymore. Looking at the board of management for 1903-1904 we can see that Miss Crane is not actually the recording secretary, but she was for 1901-1902 and then comes back in 1906-1907. These are the tiny shifts that we are beginning to pick up the longer we read what these ladies were doing. We are able to piece together to try to get a more three dimensional image of the Club.

So the board of management seemed like a good place to start, since these are the women that the club revolves around, and we picked the year 1903-1904. Here is where the difficulty lies, as I have mentioned in my previous posts: many of the women are referred to by their husbands names, which makes it hard to find out their real names. However, I have been able to use different resources such as ancestry.com and findagrave.com to be able to locate the names of the men, and then many times they have the names of the women as well.

When doing these searches it is hard to determine if the information that I have found is really for the same person that I am searching for. Without knowing the birth and death information about a person before I search for them, a slew of people can come into the found list and I am unsure of if it is who I am looking for. Another thing that I am finding more relevant and difficult in my search is the cemeteries where these people are buried. Many of the ones that I have been able to find are in either Green Mount Cemetery or in Loudon Park Cemetery, with private church cemeteries thrown in throughout. Green Mount is the place where many people of prestige were buried. While I have not found out much information about Loudon Park Cemetery, there is a large portion of the cemetery which was dedicated to the burial of Union soldiers which might have had an impact on who wanted to be buried there depending on their sympathies during the war. Another piece of information is where the two cemeteries are located. Green Mount being located in Greenmount Ave, a couple of blocks south of North Ave. This is located close to where most of the members of the Club lived, therefore making it convenient for them to go to Green Mount. Loudon Park on the other hand, is a 30 minute drive from Green Mount when I put the directions into Google. On horse that would take much longer, let along a slow moving burial procession would be about two days.

The top middle of the map is a small green square which is Green Mount, Loudon Park is not pictured on the map but would be south west of the bottom left edge of the map.

Aside from the interesting information about the cemeteries I have been somewhat successful with finding information about the women. Out of the twelve members of the board of management for 1903-1904, I was able to find birth and death years for six of the members and was able to determine the names of two of the women that had gone by their husbands names. In 1903 Mrs. Jordan Stabler, or Jennie Stabler (although I am not positive that this is her) was 35; Mrs. Philip Uhler, or Julia Pearl Uhler, was 44; Miss Lydia Crane was 70; Miss Ellen Duvall was 62; Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese was 47; and Miss Eveline Early was 35.  I was really disappointed that I could not find anything on Mrs. John Wrenshall, who is the president for many years of the Club. Thanks to findagrave.com I was able to find a picture of Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese.

This image was uploaded to findagrave.com. Unfortunately we have no ability to double-check if it is really her, but hopefully it is.

It is a sad realization that many of the women in the Club are only recognized by a name that is not really theirs. Thankfully there are tools out there that help make it possible to learn about Julia Pearl Uhler instead of just Philip Uhler.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

A reader writes

Dr. Mangiavellano just wrote to me & asked me to send you this:
I’ve enjoyed reading your posts on the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore and following along with your questions and discoveries. I ran into Dr. Cole yesterday on campus before your walking tour and we fell into conversation about the pleasures (and frustrations) you’ve experienced in your research and transcriptions. We talked a little about the difficult of finding birth and death dates of club members–and how some of you have turned to obituaries of their husbands for information about the wives. Dr. Cole explained to me the frustrating reality that obituaries of prominent Baltimore husbands may mention wives in passing without any substantive reflection or information on them. Tremendously frustrating.
Might it be worthwhile to visit Greenspring cemetery (or wherever they’re buried) and seek out the graves themselves, I wonder? I’m sure you could contact the sexton, get a map of the grounds, and do some sleuthing. I doubt there would be GPS locations for them, but you never know. It would be an entirely different kind of research I’m sure most of you have done and I’d love to hear about it if you pursued it. Not only would and afternoon of traipsing around a cemetery help you find the birth and death dates you’re looking for, you can write up a great post about it. Win-win!
So yes, it looks like another field trip is in order– Hunter, maybe you could organize this one. The Green Mount Cemetery website has a lot of great info, and there are various maps available online. Plus, a bunch of the graves are indexed in the appropriately named FindaGrave.com (e.g., Miss Lydia Crane).
Posted on by Sydney Johnson

Looking Further into who these Women Were

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I have been spending a lot of time working on who was in the Club and where these women lived. Going through all of the names can be overwhelming but also extremely interesting.

Just looking at where women who are non-residents and honorary members is interesting in itself. There are women from California and even England and Paris who are a part of this club.

Something that I have found very helpful if I cannot figure out the spelling of a name is to Google search what I think the name is and then this also sometimes leads to help me learn more about who the women are. The biggest difficulty that I am coming up with is that there are many women who went by their husband’s name, as was customary of the time. I have been able to find some interesting information about some of the men and also some women too.

One woman, Miss Octavia Bates, is originally from Detroit and graduated from Ann Arbor University which is quite a feet for a woman from this time. She was mentioned speaking at many different events in different magazine articles. From addressing the fact that Universities are not academically rigorous enough for women, to being a founding member of a Suffrage Club in Michigan. Bates seems like the type of woman that could potentially make up the minority of the Club, but there is much more to find out.

The past week we were also able to get ahold of some maps that Dr. Cole found at the Maryland Historical Society. These maps were made for insurance pricing purposes and therefore are very detailed and have the numbers of on the street for certain blocks of a neighborhood. Being able to look at a physical map instead of just online and in the time period that we are working with is really cool to try to figure out who is living where.