Read Ancestors for Free Online Page B

desire. Shortly after, to the best of our knowledge, about one hour, the said Robert Maxwell died.”
    What happened after that is told in a letter to Max Fuller from a cousin of his mother’s. “My mother, Mary Maxwell, was born seven months after the sudden death of her father from dysentery. He was a well-to-do man, living in Uhrichsville, Ohio; Aunt Sade considered him a most remarkable man—very stern, and very considerate, if you can understand that combination. He never broke his word, but was quite slow giving it, she said. After his death, his partner asked for some papers which grandmother gave him, and when the estate was settled, it was found that there was nothing left, but the partner had suddenly become well to do. Grandmother farmed out her five children, and went to her sister to await the birth of my mother. The mortgage on their home was foreclosed. An old friend, Judge somebody, I cannot remember the name, bought in the property, and gave grandmother a deed. One of the choicest stories in our family is that when the sons were grown, they repaid the amount to the old Judge. Mother always rejoiced in telling that. Later grandmother had some of her childrenwith her, and always my mother; but never your grandfather; he had the hardest lot of all of them, and was I fancy the most ambitious, or he would never have done so well as he did with all the handicaps he had.”
    In my Grandmother Maxwell’s scrapbook, under the heading “Maxwell Fuller’s Own Grandfather,” there is an account of his life, in her handwriting. It is maddening. She must have known something about his early years, but what she put down is what she found in print (as if that alone was dependable) in a history of Logan County, published in 1886.
    My copy came down to me through the other side of the family, accidentally, in the same box with a dozen big black bound volumes of the
Century
magazine I had asked for. The spine is missing and the cover hangs by a few threads, but the pages are edged, top, sides, and bottom, with gilt, the type is of a good size, the paper hasn’t turned brown after eighty-five years, and the lithographic portraits are of men and women who clearly believed that since God knew exactly what they were like, there was no point in trying to deceive the photographer.
    The paragraph about my Grandfather Maxwell begins: “Robert Creighton Maxwell, attorney at law, Lincoln, Illinois, is a native of Ohio, born in Uhrichsville, Tuscarawas County, August 6, 1849. His parents were Robert and Jemima (Keepers) Maxwell, the former a native of Virginia, of Scotch descent, and the latter of Ohio, of Welsh descent. His parents moved to Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, where the father died in 1854. His mother then returned to Ohio, where she is still living. After the father’s death the family was broken up and our subject found a home with strangers.”
    My grandfather was barely five years old when his fatherdied. He was the fourth child; he had an older sister and two older brothers and a brother who was two years younger. Was it chance that he had the hardest lot of all of them? Or was it because his mother knew that he was the one who was most able to stand up to adversity?
    Simple hard work or even being worked to the limit of his strength I do not think would have been considered, in that period, a hard lot. He must have been harshly treated (though the writer of that letter could have meant merely that he was cut off from all family affection).
    It is only partly clear what happened. Jemima Keepers, having no home of her own, and expecting another child, went to live with her sister, but couldn’t keep her other children with her and so they were divided up, probably among her relatives. There was no one who was able, or willing, to take my grandfather, and she had no choice but to entrust him into the keeping of strangers. Though a bookish man, my grandfather knew enough about farming to do it competently for several