The three women in the collage are my mother Clotine Simpson (Lindsey) (1922-2001), her mother Hattie Batchelor (Simpson) (1888-1968), and Hattie’s mother Catherine Ryan (Batchelor) (1849-1910). When I found this arrangement of photos on my Ancestry age, I shared it with a niece and two nephews — I live in hope of interesting the next generations of my family in their family history.
One of my nephews replied by noting that my great-grandmother Catherine (his great-great-grandmother) looks rather worn for a woman in her 50s. I don’t know precisely when that photo of her was taken, but think it was made not long before my great-grandfather George Richard Batchelor died in 1907. Catherine was 58 in 1907. The photo of her face is clipped from a larger one of Catherine and George sitting side by side on chairs facing the camera, hands in their laps, looking, as people did in that period when their photos were taken, grave and unsmiling.
As I pointed out to my nephew when he remarked on how worn Catherine appears, by the time this photo was made, she had borne fifteen children and had seen five die, four in infancy and one at age fourteen. She was born in the townland of Inchacarran in Killahy civil parish in County Kilkenny, Ireland, at the tail end of the Famine. Of the seven children the baptismal registry of her parents’ Catholic parish in Mullinavat shows born to her parents Valentine and Bridget Tobin Ryan, only three were alive in 1854 when Bridget brought her surviving children Margaret, Patrick, and Catherine to New Orleans to join Valentine, who had arrived in New Orleans two years earlier. All her life long, Catherine talked of harrowing sights she’d seen on the ship, the James Nesmith, that brought her, a girl not yet five, and her mother and siblings to New Orleans.
Catherine saw things in her life, this is to say: famine, death, a solemn leavetaking of a place and family her parents grieved bitterly to leave, the Civil War in which her brother Patrick lost an eye and part of his hand and arm as a Union soldier in Arkansas, and, as I’ve just noted, the deaths of five of her children. I can understand her being worn by her mid- to late-50s.
And this is not even to mention the chores and responsibilities that rural and small-town women of her era had to assume. Growing up on a small farm twenty miles south of Little Rock, then marrying and living on another small farm nearby, Catherine’s daily routine might have included any and all of the following tasks: drawing water and bringing it from the well to the house, milking cows and making butter, tending to the garden (tilling, planting, hoeing, harvesting), taking care of the chickens and gathering their eggs, gathering vegetables and fruit from the garden and orchard, cooking, canning and drying food, tending to sick family members and neighbors, sewing, mending worn clothes, quilting, looking after infants and small children, and on and on.
Fortunately, children sometimes shared these chores that their mothers were expected to do routinely. I suspect that the four of Catherine’s daughters who lived to adulthood helped with cooking, gardening, milking, butter-churning, sewing, taking care of younger children, etc., and perhaps their brothers took care of things like fetching water and bringing it to the house, hoeing and weeding the garden, bringing vegetables from garden to house, etc. In addition to all this work, I know from stories my grandmother Hattie told me as I was growing up that her mother Kate was a skilled and well-known midwife in their rural community, and people would often come knocking at her door late at night to ask her to saddle her riding horse and come to their house to help deliver a child. My grandmother spoke abashedly, as an adult, of how resentful she had felt to see people expecting her mother to throw shawls about her, saddle a horse, and ride off in the dark on cold winter nights to help with a birth. Her mother did not ever complain about this, my grandmother said.
A woman’s lot…. It was long designed to wear women out early in life in the past, wasn’t it? And still is so designed in many places in the world…. And that perhaps explains why the old saying that I heard in my formative years keeps lingering on in some quarters: Man’s work is sun to sun, but woman’s work is never done.
BEGATS AND BEQUEATHALS 