In the five generations before you are thirty-one women who had a direct impact on who are today. Do you know their stories?
One of the things they all have in common is that they faced challenges. By learning about those challenges you can stand taller, drawing on their strength and understanding their weaknesses.
Catherine Adams Pilling, a third-great-grandmother, stood tall in the challenges she faced. She and her husband moved to Canada in the 1880s and had the resources to build a nice, two-level frame home. What did she do with that comfort? She opened her door to weary travelers as they crossed the border. She offered them a place to stay and a meal at their table. That door was open to anyone. She looked for ways to help those around her, including delivering hundreds of babies over her lifetime. She was known as “Grandma” to many.
And while women like that are easy to admire, most likely your family tree will contain women with different stories. Women like Lavica.
Lavica, in the same generation as Catherine, supposedly had eleven children. I have only found the names of seven. What happened to those other children? The most likely they died young.
When she was about 35 years old, in the mid-1860s, Lavica started having bouts of “chronic mania.” By then she bore her children, seven living, more unknown. The Civil War had finally ended. She was born in Kentucky and surely knew people directly impacted.
In 1870 she still lived with her family, but was regarded as “insane.” She was sent to the mental hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, about 120 miles west from where her family lived. The state built a new hospital and in 1877 they moved Lavica to the South Illinois Asylum for the Insane in Anna, Illinois, about 160 miles south of her family. She died six years later, most likely seeing her family infrequently during the last years of her life.
Both of these women, without regard to their life experience, contributed to who I am today. I can see in myself Catherine’s care for those around her. I also recognize my struggles with mental health, seemingly minor when I consider what life looked like through Lavica’s eyes.
How have the women in your family tree, the ones you have never met, contributed to the woman you are today?
