Family Values
Lessons in material culture
Part I | II | III
II.
I finally finished the spreadsheet describing the more than two hundred household items my mother had collected. The immediate family laid claim to their favorites—the Victorian bedroom set, the Quimper china, the coin silver spoons, the pendulum clocks. We agreed the family would keep those things—chipped, tarnished, and scarred though they are—that had been passed down through multiple generations. The rest would be sold at the estate sale.
Here, at last, among the miscellaneous accumulation of the family’s past, I struck gold.As planned, I returned to Ohio in late May, white gloves and husband in tow, with only a few days to organize the family letters and photographs. I looked forward to finishing the task quickly. However, it would soon become obvious that my real work had only begun: tucked among dozens of unidentified daguerreotypes and scores of letters, I found firsthand evidence of the soldier himself.
Wrapped carefully in a handkerchief, lying face to face, were two daguerreotype group portraits of John J. P. Blinn and his siblings, three children in each one, their images partially obscured by deterioration. A scrap of paper with their names fell out: Amory, the eldest son, and the only surviving child of Horace’s second wife, sits by Horace Jr., arms crossed, in the middle, and Charlotte to the right. In the companion photo, John, a young adolescent, is next to Sarah, a toddler, who sits like a china doll atop the stool, with Julia to the far right.
Among the scores of letters—far too many to sort through—a small booklet with a dark navy cover and gold lettering stood out:
GREGORY’S EXPRESS
POCKET LETTER BOOK,
DESIGNED
TO FACILITATE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN CITIES AND
TOWNS, AND THE MINING DISTRICTS IN CALIFORNIA,
AND ALL PARTS OF THE UNITED STATES.
Fig. 4. Daguerreotypes (left to right): Amory, Horace, & Charlotte; John, Sarah, & Julia, c. 1855, from the author’s collection.
It was a letter from the children’s father, Horace, written on April 16, 1851, to Charlotte while prospecting for gold with his son Amory in California—another piece of my family’s history that was unknown to me. My mother had started to transcribe it a few years before her death, but stopped about half-way through. "It is a kind of Lottery business to get anything handsome," Horace writes from Owsley’s Bar on the Yuba River. "The great majority do not realize a Fortune. It is hard work to get Gold here even in small amounts—"; Still, he continues: "We think we can make more here than we can at home— Indeed we ought—for the Miner’s Life is a miserable one—If it’s not our fortune to strike any Rich Diggins—we will try to make the poor ones afford enough to take us Home." So John’s father, who was the son of a sea captain born on Independence Day, 1776, in Wethersfield, Connecticut, had not only pioneered to the West in 1825, settling in Terre Haute, but also on the eve of his fiftieth birthday had traveled overland to California.
Rifling through the last plastic bin of papers as the second day drew to a close, I came upon a handful of letters beautifully preserved, written in a flowing script, by John J. P. Blinn himself. Here, at last, among the miscellaneous accumulation of the family’s past, I struck gold. There were ten letters in all, written to his younger sister, Julia, and to a family friend, Charles Hosford, from various encampments in Virginia and Maryland in 1861 and 1862. My husband set about reading them, finding John’s elegant hand easy to decipher and his thoughts remarkably sensitive.
As I sorted through the papers and photos, he would read me a choice passage. John is encouraging his younger sister to get a "liberal education." And, in one poignant and intriguing passage, he tells Charles that he especially cherishes his "warm-heartedness and true friendship" because Charles was there with John’s father, "when the unfortunate accident occurred which ended his life." What was this "unfortunate accident" that took Horace’s life? In other letters, John describes various battles, telling his sister how he is sickened at heart after his regiment’s losses at Antietam. Like a good many officers in the Civil War, he complains about the "system" for promotion that often rewarded soldiers for their political connections rather than their accomplishments in the field. "Rank is nothing in this service, and is only desirable for its pay," he writes Julia. "It cannot be respected as long as so many incompetent officers occupy prominent positions."
Impressed with John’s candor and eloquence, my husband and I agreed that these invaluable papers and photographs should accompany us back to New Haven. I would delay any decisions about where or how to disperse them until I had given everything more careful consideration.
Had I continued as associate dean of libraries at Indiana University, I never would have had the time to discover John J. P. Blinn. Instead, I would have taken a couple of days off to attend my mother’s memorial service, claimed a few family heirlooms without knowing their provenance, and returned to work, never giving a second thought to the fate of family letters. I was accustomed to keeping my professional and personal lives separate. At work, I was concerned with preserving resources for future generations of scholars; at home, it never occurred to me that I might advise my mother about the proper care and dispensation of family papers. While evaluating the database, Archives USA, for the library, I never thought of searching it for collections relating to my own family. When I announced the acquisition of an electronic collection of American Civil War letters and diaries, I never imagined that I would later use it to learn about my family’s past.
