Lafayette’s Family Portrait

Now 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.