Monday, April 29, 2013

Lafayette’s Family Portrait


Maud Bean wife of Samuel W Bean of Alameda CANow that you know more than you ever hoped to know about the Lafayette D. Woodworth family—well, unless you are a distant Woodworth cousin—let’s stretch this line out just a tad more, then reel it back in to return to a less-remote segment of the past, so we can continue examining our original subjects, Maud Woodworth and her blind and deaf husband, Samuel W. Bean of Alameda, California.

Let’s not retract that long line of generations quite so fast, though. After all, working our way so far back in time, of course, dangled before our eyes that tempting possibility of eligibility for Daughters of the American Revolution. Thanks to one of the biographical sketches we found, we learned not only Lafayette’s 1824 date of birth (or 1823, depending on which of the two publications you choose to believe), but his father’s name, also. From that father’s vantage point on the American history timeline, with a little mental math, it was not difficult to negotiate our way to speculation that perhaps a grandfather might have been a patriot.

And indeed, that appears to be the case. For anyone connected to Lafayette’s father—Jabez Woodworth—you’d be interested to see that his father, Jabez Senior, served in the war with fellow colonial residents of Connecticut, as is listed in the D.A.R. database.

That, however, is a quest for other researchers to pursue. For now, let’s retrace our steps back toward the present—back through the generations leading from Lafayette to William to Maud, the young woman who, leaving her blind father in southern California to enroll in school up north in Berkeley, hoped to train as a teacher of the blind. While there, as we’ve already mentioned, she met and married a blind (and deaf) man, soon finding herself the mother of two rambunctious boys—as well as touring companion for her husband’s nationwide business endeavors.

There is more—just a little bit more—on her own story that we’ll need to attend to tomorrow.


8 comments:

  1. I hope someone "comes out of the woodwork" and can follow up with the DAR!!

    :) How cool would that be?! :)

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    1. It would have to be someone very distantly related. Remember, of Maud's own children and their descendants, there are no survivors at this point, mainly because of the Marfan syndrome. However, of her siblings' lines--or up another generation to her father's siblings' lines--there may be more descendants for whom this would still be a possibility.

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  2. Aha, a patriot! Once you've found you're connected to someone "in the database," i think you're in the DAR if you want to be. Was Maud's blindness congenital, do you think?

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    1. I think the case of Maud's own blindness was more likely of a different cause than what most people know as blindness. She was able, at a point in young adulthood, to regain her vision through the help of very strong lenses. I don't know much more of that story, but since I do know that some of the Woodworth descendants with Marfan syndrome were afflicted with a retinal issue, I wonder if her problem was more akin to that than any more commonly-known form of blindness.

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  3. Maude wasn't blind. Her father, and husband, yes.
    Jacqui, your storytelling and writing style is marvelous! Every time I think I might be getting a little tired of the Beans or Woodworths, you pull me right back in. And there is pretty much *no* chance that I am related!
    OK, what's the just a little bit more.... ;-)
    Wandering off to a couple of "You Might Also Likes....)

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    1. Thank you, Linda. I'm glad you were persuaded to get pulled right back in! And thanks so much for your comment. I always enjoy it when readers stop to say hi and share what they notice of the posts...just one way we serve to encourage each other in our writing and research.

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  4. Onward and forward..you have already discovered so much backwards info on the Woodworths:)

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    1. Definitely. Finding the link to the D.A.R. records was enough for me...for the time being. I may revisit this line at another time and work on it some more. I think sometimes this family history research needs to go in cycles--working backwards in waves, then moving to another line and repeating the process on new material.

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