As I sit in front of a laptop computer, air conditioning humming, with a refrigerator full of food only a few feet away, with a car that will take me anywhere I want to go, and delivery trucks that will drop off clothing and other necessities at my door, it seems to me as though anyone who lived without these conveniences and luxuries was much stronger than I am. So many of my ancestors experienced such privation and hardship; their lives were so much harder than mine; they must have been very strong to endure such things. And there is so much we don't know about their lives, the challenges that aren't recorded. It's really hard to call out 'strength' as a characteristic for one of them -- it seems unfair to all the others.
So I'll take this as an opportunity to talk about one woman whose story I know at least a little bit about, whose strength was remembered -- and perhaps a little feared.
Eldora Officer Nance was the fourth of five children born to Harriet Hornbuckle and Lewis Melville Nance. Minerva was 11 years old, Tom was 6, and Mary was 5 when Dora was born on September 23, 1866. The baby of the family, Laura, was born seven years later. Mary died when Dora was only four. Dora's middle name, "Officer," was shared with her maternal grandmother, Nancy Officer Rutledge, who had, in turn, been given the middle name in honor of her paternal grandmother, Jennie Officer, the first of the Irish Officer family to be born in the new world. As a genealogist, I just have to say how much I love the tradition of passing ancestral surnames down as middle names! But tracing heritage to the Scots-Irish immigrants who had settled first in the Blue Ridge Mountains and then moved up into the Great Plains was a source of great pride for the Nance and Hornbuckle families.
Dora's family lived in rural Boone County, Iowa, not far from the Des Moines River. Lewis Nance farmed and Harriet kept food on the table and clothes on everyone's backs. I own a milk glass bowl that Dora wrote about filling with dew-fresh berries before summer breakfasts. There is one very unflattering photograph of Dora as a young girl, in which she looks rather cross-eyed. Glasses weren't readily available to children but she was fitted with spectacles as a teenager. She apparently loved school and reading, though. The Nance children were sent to country schools whenever it was possible to get them there. One thing Dora kept was a photo of her country school classmates and their teacher taken during a reunion in March of 1914. Dora would have been 48 and their teacher, A.C. Smith, was in his eighties, I think. She was very proud of her education and celebrated her female classmates at a time when schooling for women was considered quite optional.
Lewis and Harriet and their family worshiped with the Methodists in the area, first at neighbors' homes and then at a church built in 1862 nearby Xenia. In 1881, the railroad bypassed Xenia and most everyone there upped sticks and rebuilt around a space just south along the new railroad tracks including the Methodists, who built an impressive church in the new town of Woodward that appeared in that spot. In 1888, the church began offering Sunday School. One of the teachers was 38-year-old George Thomas, whose wife, Mary Jane Rhoads, had died two years before. Twenty-two-year-old Dora assisted him with the youngsters in his class. Two years later, on February 25, 1890, Dora and George were married.
George brought a daughter from his first marriage to the new household. At 14, Maud was only ten years younger than her father's 24-year-old bride. I know almost nothing of Maud's personality. I know that she went on to become a teacher, so I would think the two women would have had similar interests. Still, 14 is a tough age at which to acquire a stepmother, especially one who is very young, herself. In this picture of Maud and Dora together, I think Maud looks unutterably sad, while Dora looks determined; I don't think the picture with her young stepdaughter was Dora's idea or an attempt at bonding. Maud is gone from the household by 1900 and I do not know what became of her.
In 1892, George and Dora welcomed their only child, George Wayne Thomas. On his first day of school, Dora leaned out the door after him and called "You be good, Shug!" to the delight of all the other children within earshot. He was known as "Shug" ever after.
George Sr. operated a variety of retail businesses, including a restaurant. He made and sold candies and confections. On October 29, 1905, George Thomas died suddenly of a ruptured gall bladder. Probate records make it look as though his financial affairs were in some disarray. Residential lots scattered here and there as well as his store and its contents were sold to pay debts and to (hopefully) provide a living for Dora and Shug. According to records, an attempt was made to locate Maud for her share of inheritance but was unsuccessful.
Dora and Shug moved to rather inexplicably to Ames, where Shug graduated from high school. Dora is recorded as the owner of the house there but they did take in boarders. Sometime after 1915, Dora and Shug moved back to Woodward. Shug enlisted when World War I broke out and served in the Army Air Force. Dora kept all the letters and post cards he wrote to her while he was away. She rented out their house and moved in with Minerva, who was also widowed until Shug returned home. Shug's mention in his letters of his army wages being sent to Dora make it clear that she had very little else to live on at this point.
In 1923, Shug married Inez Holmes, a widow with a young daughter, Jean, and the next year, welcomed Dora's only grandchild, Dorothy. Shug and his wife worked, and Dora took in sewing and took commissions for clothing and quilts. She was expert at knitting lace, as well. Pooling their resources, the family bought a two-bedroom house in Woodward and Dora shared a room with Shug's daughter and step-daughter. This was the same house in which our mother, Dorothy, raised my brother and me some forty-five years later.
Dorothy remembered that Dora had very long hair, red threaded with silver, that she uncoiled and brushed for one hundred strokes each night, using hairs taken from the brush to re-fasten her braid. She said that after Dora found lumps in her breasts, she had a double mastectomy, although she lived for many years after that, so it likely wasn't cancer. Dora was horribly afflicted with arthritis, especially in her hips and back and walked with two canes for the last decade of her life. But she continued her sewing and knitting, and cared for the two girls while Shug and Inez were at work. Dorothy said that every afternoon, Dora would peel an apple with a paring knife, producing a single, long curl before cutting the apple into pieces to share while she read out loud to her granddaughter (Jean, seven years older, was at school).
Dora died on Easter Sunday in 1938. According to her obituary, she had been a charter member of the local Rebekah Lodge, the women's auxiliary to the International Order of Odd Fellows. She worked as a member of the Ladies Aid Society and the American Legion Women's Auxiliary. It said that "She bore her long years of suffering with such Christian fortitude that no word of complaint was ever heard, and lives were made brighter and hearts lighter by her presence."
The thing we tend to forget about strength is that, alone, it's not a virtue. As L'Morte de Arthur and all ensuing retellings have attempt to remind us, "might doesn't make right." While the tribute in Dora's obituary sounds rather saccharine, my mother confirmed that Dora was not a whiner or complainer, even when in tremendous pain. It seems that, quietly and unrelentingly, she was a woman of iron will. Throughout her life, I believe that she evaluated the options and made choices with her head rather than her heart.
In particular, I wonder about the search for Maud Thomas, as a beneficiary of her father's estate. The woman described in the probate records, Mrs. Maud Wena of Pueblo, Colorado, doesn't seem to have ever existed. I think it likely that Maud was in Pueblo, at least for a time, but the surname is... mis-remembered, at best. At worst, inadequate details were knowingly provided in the hopes that the prodigal daughter would remain lost and a larger portion of the estate be granted to Shug and Dora.
A History of Boone County, Iowa was published in 1914. Books like this were very common and typically is included short biographies of "leading citizens" were solicited from area citizens. George C. Thomas is included in the write-ups and from the amount of information that is provided about the Nance family in his few paragraphs, I'm quite certain that Dora was very involved in their creation. It breaks my heart a little bit that there is no mention of George's first wife or his eldest child; they have been erased from that particular written history.
Instead, I read a story of a woman who would have liked to have had more opportunity to control her own destiny, but who made the most of the ones that came her way. I don't know all the circumstances, so it's not for me to judge her choices, but I certainly recognize the strength of character and mind she had in making them.
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