This heritage is even expressed culturally in my own everyday life, despite having been raised in the Caribbean as a Dutch child and having spent the majority of my life NOT in the American South. For example, I have a slight Southern accent I sometimes unconsciously slip into, and I often crave the food I grew up eating (fried okra, gumbo, and Tex-Mex).
I also honestly believed I was the first of my family to move up north.
I’m going to neglect Lincoln for now and focus on Mary. As seen from this death certificate, Mary was the daughter of Henry Styers and Jane Pulver.
Now, Jane’s parentage was a little difficult to trace (and not because her last name is misspelled on the death certificate, because typos like that happen all the time; it’s not fun but they’re definitely expected). I do have this 1850 census where she’s 5 years old living with her 3 other siblings, father (Charles Deniston Pulver), and what appears to be her grandmother, Catharine Kline, but where’s her mother?
I decided to take a look into the Kline family and found out that Kline was Catherine’s married name. She was living with her grandchildren and son-in-law because her daughter, Jane Amelia Kline, had died shortly after the birth of her granddaughter, Jane Amelia Pulver (later to be Jane Amelia Styers).
HOW TRAGIC IS THIS?! The girl never got to know her own mother. I definitely had to pause for a bit when this realization dawned on me. I haven’t discovered yet how she died. Based on the timing of her death with the birth of a child, I would assume it had something to do with childbirth, but that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have died from some other horrible disease du jour.
Now, unless someone tells me otherwise from their own family history compilations, I will assume that Catherine was so out of her mind with grief at the untimely passing of her beloved daughter that to console herself and honor her child’s memory, she enthusiastically brought all her grandchildren to New York with her for two years so her son-in-law could find them a new mother (because, let’s be real: male lawyers back in the 1800s probably didn’t have the time nor interest in being primary caregivers to their own children; better ship them off with grandma than to take care of them himself as he courts a new woman young enough to be his daughter).
It seems like he could have picked a better stepmother for his kids, though. Speaking as someone who used to be a teenage girl, we don’t tend to run away from functional, loving, and accepting families/homes. If anyone has some tea on that step-family relationship, I would love to see/read/hear it. It looks like the second wife was only 8 years older than his oldest daughter (and 23 years younger than him), which is what I’m pinpointing as a potential problem.
Anyway, it appears that Catharine Kline is super grandma… or should I say super oma? If you’re confused by that question, it’s a not-so-subtle hint that there’s more to this story to find out in my next post ;) And in case anyone gets confused about what the family tree looks like at this point in history, here is a little visualization I created using FindMyPast’s online tree maker.
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