Finding the Women

Here’s something about family history: you encounter a lot of men. Until relatively recently, women were rendered invisible in many kinds of historical records. Upon marriage they lost their surnames and often enough their first names, too, at least in public. They were simply Mrs. John Smith. (Recovering those names is a common genealogical challenge.) Sometimes women brought wealth into a marriage (dowery) or a had a right to part of an estate upon being widowed (dower); other times they appeared with their husbands on land deeds. In most cases, however, women are absent from financial records even though they often managed the finances of their households.

And that’s the thing—while women may be obscured in the records, the roles they played in their families and communities were significant. When researching, that can be too easy to forget.

You will always find examples of truly remarkable women. In my own family, the Woulfe sisters of Waco, Texas (pictured above), fit that category. In particular, Honor Woulfe (second from left) never married. Instead she traveled the world, fighting for women’s suffrage and writing stories and plays. She even had an affair with an Irish novelist, an affair that found its way into his work.

Of course, most women—no different from most men—lived more regular lives. And one of the challenges for the family historian is to recover those lives so that a family’s story is not simply the story of its men.

I was having that conversation with a client recently, and she mentioned an old family legend of how a Union soldier’s wife threw him out of the house when he returned from the war. To my embarrassment, I hadn’t noticed that, indeed, the couple were living separately in the 1870 census. But did the wife actually harbor Confederate sympathies? That’s how the story goes, and it led me to more deeply research her family’s history. (Genealogists tend to follow surnames, another way that women can be lost.) Sure enough, while the wife’s brother also fought for the Union, five of her first cousins served with John Singleton Mosby. One was even a pallbearer at Mosby’s funeral.

Confederate sympathies suddenly seemed more plausible. And a woman’s life came into view, if only just a tiny bit.

This is the challenge and the joy of family history.

Interested in hiring Black Sheep? Look at our services page and then think about the remarkable women in your family.