I’ve been rotating counter-clockwise from the top left to highlight the individual items that makes up the cover of Lineage, so we’re now at this compelling watercolor family record that’s in the lower left.
The Craft Family watercolor family record is in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. It is a beautiful piece, though haunting in its stark recognition of how death shaped family experience. In particular it points to the reality of women’s deaths in childbirth, a topic of fear and speculation among contemporary women. Elizabeth Davis Craft, whose birth in 1743 and marriage in 1763 were recorded on this object of family history, died in March of 1776 along with an infant. Her tombstone in the East Parish Burying Ground in Newton, Massachusetts, is “in Memory of Elizabeth Craft (& Child).” A scholarly essay just last year in the William and Mary Quarterly notes that by one estimate, women’s mortality in 18th century New England was significantly higher than men’s during their 20s until menopause. Though the author is skeptical that maternal deaths account for all of that differential, he acknowledges that discerning cause of death from non-systematic records is difficult, and that the best evidence for this period about the rate of women dying in childbirth comes from only a handful of sources. These include the Maine midwife Martha Ballard, whose extraordinary success with delivering healthy babies to healthy mothers might be an outlier.
The Craft record is just one among the number of such renderings of the multiple mothers to a father’s children. Finding ways to illustrate the reality of these families, as the Crafts, with 14 children born across thirty years, did not seem to strain family historians. Joseph Craft had remarried to Sarah Craft less than a year after Elizabeth’s death, and they had their own first baby within 9 months. Blended families are nothing new, and neither is representing the relationships among stepparents, stepchildren and new sibling relationships. As we look at the Craft record, and also at the data that can be found elsewhere about this family, we see that by the time Sarah Craft had been married to Jospeh for five years she had 8 children under her care, including a baby and two toddlers– plus Elizabeth’s last, young Amasa, still only 6.
By the time they commissioned this lovely piece in 1802, they shared a rich family history. Joseph and Elizabeth’s first child, their daughter Sarah, born just 9 months after their marriage, had married Jeremiah Wiswall in 1784. She named two of her own children after her mother, Elizabeth, and her mother’s last child, Amasa.
A book note. A friend who also has a new book prompted me to look at how my book is faring on that big site for sales, and it was a kick to see it at #4 in US history last week. That site fluctuates a lot, so it was at #14 the next day (still the only woman author in the top 20)! But how great to see that. I know I’ve mentioned it here but will say again that ordering direct from OUP you can use a promo code for 30% off: AUFLY30. Thanks to anyone and everyone who is willing to read and talk with me about the book, whether you buy it or not. Truthfully, I’m most excited to see it in libraries!