My great-grandmother Sylvia was born in 1886 in rural Indiana. She was nine years old when her father, a farmer and a Civil War veteran, died of a stroke. Her mother married again, and Sylvia lived in her stepfather and mother’s home until she was married at the age of twenty years. Her oldest daughter was born only six months after she was married. When I once brought this tidbit up at a family reunion, more than 100 years later, Sylvia’s son-in-law replied in a completely deadpan voice, “You have to be sure there’s somebody to inherit the farm.” Further checking into the facts reveals that his eldest daughter was also conceived out of wedlock. Obviously today having a baby before a wedding is usually no longer quite as scandalous as it used to be. The thing is, it happened a lot more often when it was scandalous than we, living today, might think. There was a code of silence among families about such things for centuries. Women would quietly disappear for months at a time, and when they resurfaced, depending on their economic circumstances, they would be married and a new parent, they would have a surprise baby sibling, or someone in the next county would have adopted a baby. There have been thousands of children like Lady Edith’s Marigold in Downton Abbey, in whose case three families had their quiet lives disrupted so that when the dust settled, the Granthams had a new “ward”.
In October 1909, Sylvia with her husband and two small children took a series of trains from their home in northeastern Indiana to central California, where they became itinerant workers. They lived “near Fresno,” and “there were numerous jobs and places – a cattle ranch, picking and packing oranges, picking grapes, lemons, grapefruit, shaking prunes off of the trees and Shavers sawmill in the mountains where Sylvia cooked for the gang.” If they were enumerated in the 1910 census in California, I have never been able to find the record; and as diligently as I have looked I have never been able to find an address where they might have stayed. However, Sylvia’s mother, stepfather, brother and half-siblings were living in Fresno County in 1910. It is certainly possible that either they followed Sylvia’s family out west to California, or that Sylvia’s family followed them, but in spite of their six surviving children publishing their memories of their growing-up years in 1991, no mention is ever made of why any of them picked up their lives and moved them to California during this time. Sylvia made a very good friend while they lived in California, and she was so well recalled by the children that she is mentioned by name: Anna Grable. In 1910 Anna, her husband, two sons and two daughters were also living in Fresno County, California. “Mrs. Anna Grable served as midwife for the births of Earl and Eleanor,” Sylvia’s two children who were born during their time in California.
“Returning to Indiana in 1915,” (again, no mention of any reason given for cutting short their California adventure) “they settled on the Fitch place and Bert worked as a laborer for Mr. Whitt. The following year they moved to Katie Ann’s farm, and he was allowed 3/5 of the share. When World War I ended they were working in the cornfield and could hear all the bells ringing. In 1921 they were on the Mumma place in Cedar Creek Township, and it was a big, old, scary house. On to the Henry place in Perry Township in 1923 where it was cash rent. The permanent farm at Lake Everett was purchased in 1926 for $15,000. The Depression in the 1930s was bad for everyone but being on the farm there was food available by the sweat of the brow and they managed quite well, possibly better than the city people.” Katie Ann was Sylvia’s mother, who in 1920 was divorced from her second husband and working as a live-in servant for a private family in Smith Township, Whitley County, Indiana. When Katie Ann died in 1939, her obituary stated that she was a “former Churubusco resident and well known throughout this region”. I have not been able to find out what farm Katie Ann owned in 1916, or when she returned to Indiana from California.
Sylvia kept records of everything, starting in a notebook she must have had as a scholar, because the first several pages are given over to stories, poems, notices of birthday parties that have the feel of writeups for the newspaper gossip column, and the first few lines of letters that were never finished, never sent. I don’t know whether any of the stories or poems are original, or whether they were things she just copied down because she liked them, including a piece called “A night ride with witches,” which directly precedes the beginning of a list of things she bought on January 11 (probably 1906 or 1907) and how much they cost. If you’ve heard or read the phrase “butter and egg money,” Sylvia kept track of that, too – the produce that a farmer’s wife sells to make a little for expenses. In February 1908 she had $16.89 on hand, sold eggs for $6.88, butter for 50 cents, some wood for $5.00, and did some sewing for $1. In the same month she bought sugar, corn meal, oil, syrup, talcum, prunes, salt, coffee, crackers, baking powder, oatmeal, a dress and underwear, baby clothes, fabric, hose, knives and forks, thread and pins, a flatiron handle, teaspoons, a lantern globe, turpentine, and a few other things I couldn’t discern. In other months that year she made note of purchasing animal feed, paying other people to do farm work, being paid by other people to do farm work, selling hogs, cow hide, and wool, and every month – butter and eggs.
The records go on, every month, every year. When they moved to California, there are Sylvia’s records of all the things they sold – from animals (cows, pigs, chickens) to furnishings (carpet & rugs, window shades, rocking chair) to foodstuffs (cabbage, pile of corn, potatoes). There are records of sales and purchases for their California years (including as income in February 1913, “found $0.25”), and pick up again in Indiana with no mention of the trip home. Over the years the things they buy and sell change a little and the amount of money moving around changes a lot - for instance the egg money in 1942 had increased to about $18 a week, their youngest daughter visited the dentist and paid $3, they had to pay a dog tax of $2, and in 1943 they paid $10 for “Mexicans hoeing beets”.
During the beginning of World War II, Sylvia kept her rationing records, including a Sugar Purchase Certificate of 24 June 1942 from the Office of Price Administration authorizing her to accept delivery of 60 pounds of sugar. In September 1943 the handwriting in the record book changes, subtly, but forever, when Sylvia died, and her husband Bert took over where she left off. Sylvia Elizabeth (Freeman) Hollopeter passed away on 28 August 1943 at the Methodist Hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her death certificate tells that her immediate cause of death was “anemia and exhaustion from long illness with jaundice followed by cholecystostomy and removal of gall stones”. She was fifty-seven years old. At the time of her death her son Everett was “overseas with the army” and her son Frank was “stationed in Louisiana”. Sylvia’s youngest daughter Hazel was married two weeks after her funeral, and she named her baby, born in February 1944, Sylvia, in memory of her mother. Hazel died at the age of ninety-six years in 2022. “Baby” Sylvia died at the age of seventy-nine years in 2024.
In preschool and kindergarten (where my teachers were born in India, trained there in the Montessori method and had become full United States citizens by the time I knew them) we made butter by shaking a mason jar full of cream for two minutes and then passed it on to the next kid who would shake it for two minutes, and so on until it solidified and we spread it on somebody’s mom’s bread and ate it at snack time. My further experience with butter is limited to buying it at a grocery store. Sylvia had to do the work to make every bit of butter she ate or sold in her life. Every egg she ate or baked with or served at her table came from picking it up in her henhouse or yard – and she had so many eggs, she sold them to other people. If she (or her husband or children) needed new clothing, she sold her farm produce to make money to buy cloth, needles, thread, eventually a sewing machine, and made the clothes herself. For the most part, at least; there were notations in her ledgers for overalls, for shoes for various family members, for “a suit for graduation” for all her children. It was a point of pride in their family that all the children graduated from high school, in an age when most people considered an eighth-grade education more than enough for a farmer. So many census records in my files list the male head of household as “farmer” and the female wife as “housekeeping,” and that word is not enough to describe the backbreaking, heartbreaking, exhausting work that all women have done, do and will do as “secondary” contributors to their family’s living. Nowadays psychologists talk about the “mental load” that primarily women carry, often now in addition to full time jobs outside the home. Sylvia’s mental load was immense.
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