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My great great grandmother, Eliza Peck, did not have an easy life. She was the youngest of a large family and just after they moved west, her mother, an Ide, died. Her father quickly remarried and moved further west, away from the aunt and uncle that had moved with them. In a few years she met and married my great great grandfather and a year later she had a son, my great grandfather, and was a Civil War widow. She married again to a disabled veteran and had several children, which she raised on the income her husband made by day labor and work as a school janitor. My great grandfather married and had her first grandchild, my grandfather, just when she had her second batch of children past the toddler stage, but my great grandfather's wife died and Eliza ended up raising my grandfather along with her children. She lived to see her first great grand child, my mother, and after her death her second husband lived with my mother and her family.
My mother remembered her step great grandfather saying that his wife wrote regularly to her cousins in New York and when she got a letter back filled with news, she would always exclaim "Oh, those Ides and Pecks back in New York", and then she would tell him what those folks were up to. It was a high point in her routine.
My mother worked out the Peck genealogy, clear back to the boats from England, but got stuck on the Ide part. I did a lot of work and figured out the most likely line of Ide's based on geographic proximity, some names like George Peck Ide, and an email from a person who said my great great great grandparents marriage was in the big book of Ides. So it was logically solved, but not totally, and not satisfactorily emotionally.
Last week my brother and I and a cousin matched an Ide. Following up, it was the real thing, descendants of those letter writing cousins in New York. They liked hearing the quote from 100 years ago and we shared web links to ads for the cuffs and collars George Peck Ide invented. You can see paintings of them in the Museum of Modern Art, or buy them in their original wrappers on eBay. My great great grandmother would still be cheered by the doings of her cousins.
My mother remembered her step great grandfather saying that his wife wrote regularly to her cousins in New York and when she got a letter back filled with news, she would always exclaim "Oh, those Ides and Pecks back in New York", and then she would tell him what those folks were up to. It was a high point in her routine.
My mother worked out the Peck genealogy, clear back to the boats from England, but got stuck on the Ide part. I did a lot of work and figured out the most likely line of Ide's based on geographic proximity, some names like George Peck Ide, and an email from a person who said my great great great grandparents marriage was in the big book of Ides. So it was logically solved, but not totally, and not satisfactorily emotionally.
Last week my brother and I and a cousin matched an Ide. Following up, it was the real thing, descendants of those letter writing cousins in New York. They liked hearing the quote from 100 years ago and we shared web links to ads for the cuffs and collars George Peck Ide invented. You can see paintings of them in the Museum of Modern Art, or buy them in their original wrappers on eBay. My great great grandmother would still be cheered by the doings of her cousins.
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