This week’s challenge was “Oops.” The first thing that came to my mind was all the short pregnancies. What I mean by that is all the people who married and had a baby six to seven months later. I have seen that in many different families in many different people’s genealogies.
It’s Not New
Many people think pregnancies out of wedlock are a modern phenomena, but in reality they have always occurred. One of my favorite storiesin my family is about Matilda Jury Peelle’s short pregnancy.
Matilda
You see, the Jury family was, shall we say, a quite proper English family. As such, her short pregnancy was never ever mentioned. Matter of fact, the day her first child, Lydia, was born, her husband simply wrote in his journal that he did not work due to illness in the family. Well, this was the 1890s. Matilda and her husband William J Peelle were both well into adulthood.
It was clear, based on her daughters’ behaviors, that Matilda did not intend to have her daughters end up in the same situation. None of us knew what she told them. Did she admit that she was pregnant when she got married? Did she have a story about how it happened? None of the details were clear, except that she clearly stressed to them to be careful of men being around. So strongly was it stressed upon them, that when my dad did his DNA test, I wondered if we could uncover a family secret. (We didn’t.)
Lydia
Her mother’s words clearly impacted Lydia to the core. She never married and was so scared of men that she poured concrete on the locks on her windows. Of course, she lived in the big city (Wichita, KS, which had a little over 70,000 inhabitants in those days), moving there from a very rural area when she was barely of age. Even years later, upon arrival home, she wanted her nephew to check the house to make sure there were no men inside. And, she did not appreciate him joking about her wanting him to make sure no men escaped.
Nellie
Nellie, on the other hand, didn’t take the advice quite so much to heart. Although she came across as a very proper woman, she had a bit of flirtation in the letters she wrote to her future husband. They had a large family and seemed to live a normal life. However, she never openly talked of indiscretions of any kind. Such topics were clearly not to be discussed. However, any time Nellie and Lydia were talking and their voices became inaudible, family suspected they just might be discussing some of those topics. But, to everyone else, they were always “hush, hush!”