Spinster aunts, part one: Grace Duncan (b.1885)
“Finding out about what happened to your widows and spinsters may once have been low on your priorities as a family historian, but the effort will only enhance your understanding of women’s lives and your own family relationships.”
– Margaret Ward, The Female Line
Inspired by a recent post from Amy O’Neal at Gravestoned, and by the fact I’m finally reading Margaret Ward, I’m spending a bit of time looking specifically at the unmarried women in my tree. I’ve sort of run aground with Berkin’s Revolutionary Mothers (a book I started reading for blog reasons, oh, months ago) and with Augusta’s story all told, it seems time for a fresh angle.
As Ward points out in The Female Line, it’s very common for researchers to skim over unmarried women – “barren twigs on the family tree” – but “many spinster daughters cared for elderly parents or young nieces and nephews, ran the home and the family, had work or careers of their own, were at the forefront of charitable works or put their considerable energies into political and social reform. They deserve to be given their due in our family history researches, even if they did not provide another generation and are marked on the tree with a short line denoting ‘no issue.’”
I nearly, and I should probably not even admit this, collected a few so-called spinster aunts into one post, on the grounds that I don’t have very much information about any of them and was worried individual posts would be too scrappy. Fortunately, I realized in time that if your goal is to explore the lives of female relatives beyond their unmarried status, crushing three of them into one patronising blog post on that very basis doesn’t really serve the cause. So, scrappy it is, I’m afraid.
We’ll start with Grace Duncan, younger sister to my great-grandmother Mina. Grace was born in Dundee in 1885. I didn’t know anything about her until her name came up over lunch with my mother a few years ago in the restaurant at McEwen’s department store in Perth (we’ve been going there regularly since I was tiny; despite modernization, something about it remains pleasantly time-warpish and conducive to family history discussions). Chatting about the largely-forgotten sibling group of which Mina was a part, my mum started recalling details she hadn’t given much thought to for a while. I scribbled a lot of notes on a paper napkin and then went home and tried to flesh them out with online research.
Grace was the fifth of six children. Their father was a commission agent for a tobacco firm. In 1901, at fifteen, Grace was employed in a warehouse; this was the year her mother died. By twenty-five (as the 1911 census shows) she was a clerkess in a confectionery factory, still living at home with her father and two of her sisters. Dundee was an industrial town with a recent history of rapid expansion and prosperity, but by this time things were changing for the worse, with unemployment creeping up as the jute trade faced competition from overseas.
In 1912, Mina left home to marry my great-grandfather, leaving Grace as the elder of two remaining unmarried sisters. The following year Grace emigrated, unaccompanied, to America, heading straight for the burgeoning industrial paradise of Detroit.
I’d love to know what led her to strike out on her own, but in the absence of evidence I can only admire her boldness and speculate about the details. My best guess is that she’d simply decided her prospects in Dundee as a single woman in her late twenties were too limited, and decided to seek out greener pastures. I do know, having found her on a passenger list, that she travelled on the SS Saturnia in September 1913. She arrived in the States by way of St Albans, Vermont, naming Detroit as her final destination. (You can imagine Detroit, at that point known as “the Paris of the West”, sounding extremely attractive to a young woman who’d grown up around warehouses and factories and was keen to broaden her horizons; she had the right skills to make a shot at an independent life there.) Her occupation – “clerkess”, as on the census – is stated on the passenger list; this, and the address given as a reference, helped me to be sure I had the right woman.
The now-abandoned Michigan Central train station opened in Detroit in 1913, the same year
that Grace arrived in the city. Photo: Wikipedia (creative commons license).
We don’t know much more. My mother thinks that Grace stayed in the States, and probably in Detroit, until her death, but can dimly recall her visiting Scotland once during the 1950s: a smiling woman with an accent, bending to speak to her little great-niece. She also remembers that Kate, Grace’s youngest sister, travelled widely in later life and used to visit Grace in America quite a lot during the post-war years. We’re not aware of Grace ever having married, but nor have I been able to find her under her own name in the 1920 or 1930 US census records. In the absence of evidence, I continue to think of her as a spinster aunt (which in my mind is a good thing), and will do so until such time as I learn otherwise.
Much has changed in Detroit during the past century. You don’t really get people comparing it to Paris very much these days. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to find out about Grace’s later life, but some links I’ve noted for future investigation include the Detroit Society for Genealogical Research, the Michigan Women’s Historical Center and Hall of Fame, and the Michigan Genealogical Council. I’ve also just stumbled across Amy Elliott Bragg’s Detroit history blog, Night Train to Detroit, from the Amazon page for her book Hidden History of Detroit: lots of interest to follow up there, including a good set of links to other Detroit resources.
I enjoyed your post and totally agree with you (and Margaret Ward) about the value of researching spinster aunts. One of my Dad’s spinster great-aunts was an Army Nurse in the First World War and she is the only relative (male or female) for whom I’ve been able to find a detailed army service record. Another spinster on my paternal side was the first person in my family to go to university, travelled widely and is rumoured to have worked with the French Resistance during the Second World War (still need to look into that!).
A former genealogy client of mine had a mystery in her family as to how her grandmother, a young widow with several children, was able to afford to buy her own house at a time when few people could. It turns out she was left the money by a spinster aunt who had spent her life in domestic service and had apparently been able to build up some savings. This aunt had more or less been forgotten when it came to writing up the family history.
I am also currently researching a family whose complicated relationships I have been able to untangle partly because three orphaned children were sent from Australia to live with their Scottish spinster great-aunts. The will of one of these great-aunts is a real genealogical gold-mine, specifying which great-niece was to get the silver teaspoons, how much money was to go to each nephew etc. Researching spinster aunts can definitely be worthwhile!
So much auntish goodness in that comment, I hardly know where to begin. I remember you mentioning the possible Resistance connection on Twitter, and your WWI army nurse sounds equally interesting – would love to read more about either of those women.
There must be a lot of bloggers with similar stories to share. I’m toying with the idea of starting one of those themed linking-up things (but probably won’t, given that I’m not even sure what the term is and am generally not very keen on blog promotion).
Aunts FTW! (as I believe the young hipsters say)
Oh Aunts are marvellous. Have you ever read Katherine Whitehorn’s wonderful article about them? If you can find a copy of her collection ‘Only on Sundays’ I recommend you get it for this article alone (although the others are both funny and wise as well).
I also recommend ‘Other People’s Daughters’ by Ruth Brandon a fascinating book about governesses, many of whom would have been spinster aunts. It talks about the socio-economic circumstances that led to there being a rise in the number of spinsters in the 19th Century and about the education of women in general. Good stuff.
I haven’t read either of those, so will add them to my list immediately. Thank you!
I, too, have had several spinster aunts of my own and agree that their lives are often very full and varied. In fact the last one died last weekend and I shall be going to the funeral on Monday. She was 86 when she died and had been a nun for most of her adult life, although that didn’t stop her having some quite radical views and getting to travel to California (for a sabbatical), Canada (to visit her sister), and France (where she had another sister). She also had to give up her place at London University in 1945 when the “men” came back from the war. I only found that last bit out fairly recently. I find that quite shocking in today’s terms.
Really?! I suppose that (the university policy) isn’t hugely surprising; but how sad for the women who had to leave. A door to new opportunities briefly opened, then suddenly closed in your face. Very harsh.
But your aunt’s life sounds like a good and satisfying one, led on her own terms. I’m sorry that you’ve lost her. Hope all goes well on Monday with a good turnout.
Brave Grace! Dundee must have been a fairly depressing place to be at then, and several of my ancestors left Scotland around the same time. Looking forward to the next post in the series!
Yes, I think it must have been. One thing I’ve heard in general family chat about Dundee in those days is that people recollected “all the men hanging out the windows and drinking, while the women went to work”. No idea how accurate that is, or what situation it reflects if it is true; were women finding employment more easily because they were cheaper labour? Or was it more to do with the fact they typically worked in different industries that were less affected by hard times (confectionery versus jute, maybe)? I guess I need to read about it a little more.
Entirely agree about maiden aunts in family trees, and so rewarding when you give them the attention they deserve. I wrote, arguing in similar terms, a piece in my blog; but you have put it so much better!
Oh, I must read your post (I’m sure mine isn’t better!) – and it’s interesting to see you use “maiden aunts”. I don’t know what I would have called them before; probably just unmarried women (I’ve traditionally been wary of the word “spinster”, even though I get that most people in genealogy circles are using it as the contemporary term in discussion of times gone by).
I decided to go with spinster aunts here though, partly as a little joke to myself because it has a kind of reclaimed feminist sense now, especially as used on one particular blog where I lurk but don’t post.
Spinster is a lovely word, and I’ve just returned from a holday in English northern mill country where it was used in its original context about women who spun cotton. Maiden is probably worse, because it reduces them to some idealised, ineffectual maidenhood. Here’s one of my maiden aunts who certainly wasn’t ineffectual – http://talltalesfromthetrees.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catherine-gurney-obe-1848-1930-and-her.html – and three more (lumped together, to my shame) here – http://talltalesfromthetrees.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/anne-gurney-salter-born-c1840-and-toil.html