Jacob's Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History by Joseph Anthony Amato

Author:Joseph Anthony Amato [Amato, Joseph Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical, history, United States, State & Local, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI), reference, Genealogy & Heraldry
ISBN: 9780873516136
Google: faquswMk39wC
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society
Published: 2008-11-15T00:08:04.289541+00:00

Chet Boodry, my mother’s uncle, 1930s

In Appleton, James, Ella, and their family were transformed from rural poor into urban poor. With their move to Appleton they became renters. They rented two different homes before James’s death in 1909, when Ella moved to another apartment before ultimately living with her children until her death. Identified as a farmer on the 1897 birth certificate of daughter Irena, James held a succession of poor jobs in Appleton. In the 1904 Appleton Directory he was described as working at a canning factory. In 1906, he was a teamster, and at the time of his death in 1909, he served as a hostler—a stableman—for a local veterinarian. He was probably lucky if any of these jobs yielded a wage of a dollar a day, the going wage for unskilled mill workers. However, I find it fitting that James ended his life caring for horses, the creatures that symbolize a rural order begun in the Middle Ages, with which he had worked over a whole lifetime.

A traditional rural man, James passed his life with horses in field and in forest, on road and in stable. He delivered his family to the center of a world that was displacing his kind and his children to a world in which the Boodrys, these distant children of Arcadia, would again have to remake themselves. In taking the family to Appleton, he put my young grandmother Frances in front of a distorting mirror of wealth, talent, pleasure, and outward self-satisfaction in which she would struggle across a lifetime to recognize herself.

Appleton told Frances who she wasn’t the moment she arrived in town. It gripped her even tighter in 1906, when, as a girl of only seventeen, she began her work as a dressmaker at stylish “Mrs. Adams.” This job accompanied her during a brief stint at business school in Clintonville, and it undoubtedly swept her up heart and soul when she took up the contemporary music, theater, and arts of the valley in the company of the stylish Catholic Linsdau brothers from the nearby mill town of Menasha, Emmett and my grandfather William. They ushered her into the footlights of urban life in the Fox River Valley.

I don’t know what impact her father’s death had on Frances, although to have one’s father die a miserable and highly public death from hydrophobia must have humbled and angered her. I know it angers me. I find myself shouting out, “God, why do you let us, our kind, die the worst of deaths! Dogs’ deaths!” In any case, within a year of her father’s death in 1909, Frances married William Linsdau in a Catholic church. They moved to nearby Neenah where Frances gave birth to my mother in 1912. Then Frances and William set out for the great industrial city, Detroit, where she never found her quadrant or freed herself from that star pulling her back in time and deep in imagined place to the Town of Maine. She spent her decades in

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