Why Vote?

This is a local election day in Lowell, MA. Both City Council and School Committee representatives will be decided upon by the end of the day. Local pundits are predicting a low turnout, and I for one hope they are totally off base. Not exercising your right to vote is something that I just don't understand. Don't people want to have a voice in who represents them?In the late part of the 19th century, women and especially married women had little in the way of citizen's rights and they most certainly could not vote or hold office. While unmarried women could inherit money, married women could not. I've been reading the history of women's voting rights in one of my ancestral heartlands, Missouri, and while this is Missouri's story, there are probably many commonalities with other states.My great grandmother, Minnie Palmer Flournoy was made a young widow in 1891 when her husband Richard was killed in a tragic train accident. As a widow with two very young children, she had to fight the railroad through an attorney to get a settlement for Richard's untimely death. I have that correspondence in my genealogy files. If memory serves me correctly, she received the princely sum of $500.When women of Missouri demonstrated for the suffragette movement, my great-grandmother was part of that. I often have wondered if her motivation and support for the 19th Amendment could have had its beginning in the treatment she received from the railroad when her husband died.Nearly every time that I vote, I think of the courage my great-grandmother had to muster to participate in the suffragette marches. I am grateful, but also awed because women like Minnie Flournoy had the extraordinary courage to demand the right to participate in our representative democracy. They did not give up on this idea even when the measures were defeated as they were several times in Missouri.This morning I voted as I have on nearly every Election Day since I was old enough to do so. To do otherwise would be a disservice to those women who recognized a wrong that needed to be made right.

Time Travels Revisited

For some reason I am fascinated with history - family history. And during school vacations, when I finally have some time to spend on such endeavors, I am able to do quite a bit of research. Not exactly as exciting as skiing or snowboarding or as relaxing as sitting on a beach or by a pool, but something different to occupy my mind.This week I came across an obituary - a scrap of newspaper folded neatly into my great, great grandmother's autograph book. The obituary was for her father, James Cuthbertson Sharron. JC as he is referred to in my family (his father was James Russell Sharron), was a minister's son who himself became a minister in the Presbyterian church. His life's travels took him from Dauphin County, PA where he was born in 1810 to Jefferson College and Princeton University, then to a posting in Muskingum, Ohio around 1835. In the 1840s he moved to Iowa, before Iowa became a state. Here he moved from pioneer town to pioneer town, organizing churches in West Point and Birmingham as well as some smaller town. In the 1860s -- at the ripe old age of 50-something -- JC joined an Iowa regiment as a chaplain for the Union Army. After the Civil War, he returned to Iowa and to his ministry, dying in 1868.Now why is all of this interesting? For some reason the connections to the ancestors who make up my family history, make the dusty stories and facts that were taught to me more real. 1810, before the War of 1812.... how odd that one of "my people" went to college (twice)! 1830 was when Ohio achieved statehood - JC was in Ohio shortly after that. And yet, Ohio was too settled for him so he moved on to Iowa when the population of that territory was 50,000. The Civil War - 1865 - this ancestor lived through it.Granted that JC had a more interesting life than most of the ancestors I have uncovered. In fact for whatever reason, his story is the most complete of my ancestors' stories. Reading through my great great grandmother's autograph book reveals some of the threads of an everyday life -- the sadness of having to move to a new town, illness or deaths of friends and acquaintances, the chronicle of a plains pioneer.I am at once awed by the strength of character of these people and maybe, just maybe, beginning to understand the challenges of living in another time in history.