Mystery Monday ~ Who owned Melissa's Trunk?

Last week I visited my hairdresser, Melissa.  She and I have long discussions about genealogy and the TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?” while she cuts my hair.  Melissa is much younger than I, closer to my daughter’s age, but we have genealogy in common.  Last year I drew up one of her lineages all the way back to Thomas Leighton (1604 – 1671/2) one of New Hampshire’s earliest settlers, and she was thrilled.   This time Melissa had a puzzle for me to solve.  She had found an antique trunk at a shop in Amherst, New Hampshire.   She didn’t notice until she was home that there was a name stenciled onto the front of the trunk:

Mrs. Charles F. Aldrich

SS Cedric

Stateroom #53

This was the mystery!  Who was Mrs. Aldrich?  Was she from New Hampshire? When did she sail on the SS. Cedric?  Was there a story behind this?   Melissa had spent some time online and she knew that the steamship Cedric was one of the White Star Line’s “Big Four”.  She knew it sailed about 100 years ago, and she even looked at some passenger records on Ancestry and found several Aldrich’s on board the Cedric.  Now she was stuck and looked to me for help.

At home I tried to recreate Melissa’s search on Ancestry.com and I looked at EllisIsland.org, too.  I figured I could trace the Aldriches onboard the Cedric passenger lists with census records and other records found online.  But it wasn’t easy.  The Aldriches listed on these passenger lists didn’t quite fit the time period, nor did they seem to have husbands named “Charles F.”   I needed a way to narrow down all the Charles F. Aldriches of this time period, and there were quite a few on my list when I searched through FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com.  I even searched old newspapers of the time period, using GenealogyBank.com and the Boston Public Library website. 

While I was searching, I had a window open on my desktop running Facebook.  I decided to ask all my genealogy Facebook friends for advice.  I knew that some of my colleagues had a lot of experience with passenger lists and immigration records.  Within minutes I had over thirty comments!  And I had an answer thanks to genealogist Sue Clifford Maxwell, author of the blog “Granite Genealogy” [surprisingly not from New Hampshire!]   Later comments included Randy Seaver who said “Crowd-searching works well, eh?  Nice job!  Two hours!”  and from Glory Wedge who stated “Wow, How nice to see a group helping to find the answer.  Goes to show the power in numbers.”   Genealogist Alan Farrell even wrote that she had a relative serve on board the Cedric  as a cabin steward until 1921 (our mystery passenger sailed on the Cedric in 1929).

Here is the mystery passenger.

Maria Louisa Alexander was the daughter of Junius Brutus Alexander and Eliza Hickey Newcomb.   According to her passport application she was born on 16 March 1869 on Staten Island, New York.  On 25 November 1891  in Cambridge, Massachusetts she married Reuben Francis Richards.  He died on 26 February 1899 after two children were born.  The young widow married second on 25 December 1900 to Charles Frost Aldrich.  He was a son of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the famous Portsmouth, New Hampshire author.  Thomas Bailey Aldrich wrote the semi autobiographical book The Story of a Bad Boy in 1870 which was the first American novel about a child that was not written as a lesson or a morality tale.  He became great friends with Mark Twain, entertained him in New Hampshire, and influenced Twain’s books Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.   Aldrich became the editor of The Atlantic Monthly.  His boyhood home in Portsmouth is one of the museum buildings at the Strawbery Banke Museum. 

Unfortunately, Maria became a widow again when Charles Frost Aldrich died of tuberculosis on 6 March 1904 at the family’s summer estate at Saranac Lake in New York.  Mrs. Aldrich never remarried, but she remained socially active and traveled extensively.  There are many mentions of her in the social pages of old newspapers, including her daughter’s social debut in Boston in 1914.  She appears on at least a half dozen passenger lists to and from Europe between 1905 and the 1940s. Ancestry.com has three of Maria Aldrich’s passport applications to view.   She was a member of the Colonial Dames Society, and a descendant of Mayflower passenger William Bradford.  “Mrs. Chas Frost Aldrich” is listed in the Boston Social registers.  Her summer home in Dublin, New Hampshire was lent to Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd in 1930 [he was the aviator and polar explorer who was the first to reach both the North and South Poles by air].  Dublin is only thirty miles from where Melissa bought the trunk.

The passengers aboard the Cedric 11 May 1929
included "Mrs. C. F. Aldrich"

Apparently this wooden trunk was used by Maria L. (Alexander) (Richards) Aldrich during her voyage on the Cedric which arrived in New York on 11 May 1929 from Liverpool, England.  She arrived in Boston on 19 May 1929 according to the passenger list.  I can imagine that as a wealthy socialite, she must have had many trunks of clothing bought in Europe, and other personal items.  Melissa joked that perhaps this trunk was packed full of shoes, and she might be correct! 

This voyage was a few months before the market crash that started the Great Depression.  I can’t find any more information on Maria Aldrich, other than the fact that her last cruise to Europe seems to have been on 29 April 1937 when she returned on the Saturnia from Naples, Italy.   I don’t know her death date, or where she is buried.  I haven’t yet found an obituary.

Maria Louisa Aldrich's 1929 Passport Application

with photo!  She was 51 years old at the time, and still traveling alone. 

Sources used:

Sue Clifford Maxwell in Sandy, Utah, author of the blog “Granite Genealogy” http://granitegenealogy.blogspot.com/

Ancestry.com

FamilySearch.org

GenealogyBank.com

Boston Public Library at http://www.bpl.org/

Strawbery Banke Museum at http://www.strawberybanke.org/

Google.com

Wikipedia.com

1905 Summer Social Register, (Dilatory Domiciles) page 7

Clark’s Boston Blue Book, 1905, page 124

The 1907, 1911, 1919 and 1920   Social Register, Boston (probably others, but I have not seen copies)

Harvard Graduates Magazine, 1904, Volume 12, page 672

Two links to the Maria Louisa Aldrich passenger records on Ancestry.com

1.) The actual passenger list: http://search.ancestry.com/iexec?htx=View&r=an&dbid=8745&iid=MAT843_345-0432&fn=Maria+Louisa&ln=Aldrich&st=r&ssrc&pid=3399778

2.) Book Indexes to Boston Passenger Lists, 1899 – 1940 at Ancestry.com: http://search.ancestry.com/iexec?htx=View&r=an&dbid=1909&iid=32007_B012266-00712&fn=C+F&ln=Aldrich&st=r&ssrc&pid=1218657   (image of the “List of Cabin Passengers”)

Here are some photos of first class cabins and lounges on the Cedric.  Wow, these are some swanky cabins. Thanks, Terri Kallio!
http://www.gjenvick.com/HistoricalBrochures/Steamships-OceanLiners/WhiteStarLine/WhiteStarLineServices/1907/FirstClassAccommodations.html

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To Cite/Link to this blog post: Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Mystery Monday ~ Who owned Melissa's Trunk?", Nutfield Genealogy, posted June 25, 2012, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2012/06/mystery-monday-who-owned-melissas-trunk.html: accessed [access date]). 

Mark Twain in New Hampshire

Like millions of other tourists,
Mark Twain vacationing
in New Hampshire, 1905

This week Mark Twain’s long awaited autobiography will be published. Long awaited indeed! Twain ordered that the book wait to be released 100 years after his death. This is not the white washed Mark Twain the media has portrayed in recent years. He had a nasty sense of humor, and was very political. He loved to poke fun, but didn’t want to be around when the recipients of his barbs read his comments. The first volume of three will be released on November 15, 2010.

Twain used to vacation in Dublin, New Hampshire. Considering that he lived in Hartford, Connecticut, a summer trip to New Hampshire was a relatively easy trip. He spent at least two summers in a rented farmhouse here. In a 1905 interview for the New York Times he said "Last January, when we were beginning to inquire about a home for this summer, I remembered that Abbott Thayer had said, three years before, that the New Hampshire highlands was a good place. He was right - it is a good place.”

One of Twain’s best friends was Thomas Bailey Aldrich of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Aldrich was the author of The Story of a Bad Boy, which preceded Twain’s books about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. At the time, Aldrich’s book was a best seller, and it instituted a new form of literature about mischievous childhoods. Previous children's books were always based on morality lessons, instead of pure fun. Today, Aldrich's book is virtually unknown, but Twain’s books are considered American classics.

Mark Twain came to Portsmouth once to dedicate a museum to Aldrich. He did not enjoy his trip to the New Hampshire seacoast as much as his trip to Dublin in the Monadnock Mountain region. In fact, he said many nasty things about Portsmouth, and also quite a few pejorative remarks about Mrs. Aldrich! According to the index of the new autobiography, he mentions these in his new book. I rather think that Twain is sitting in paradise just chuckling about that right now….

For more information:

Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume I, by Mark Twain, University of California Press, 2010

http://www.seacoastnh.com/History/History_Matters/Mark_Twain_Loved_Aldrich_but_Hated_Portsmouth/ Portsmouth’s historian J. Dennis Robinson describes Twain’s relationship with Aldrich in great detail.

Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It is one of seven photographs taken in Dublin, New Hampshire by Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain’s biographer.

Quote from The New York Times, November 26, 1905, Mark Twain: A Humorists Confession, by A. E. Thomas.

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Copyright 2010, Heather Wilkinson Rojo

Not So Wordless Wednesday- Dublin, New Hampshire

Last week we took the little red convertible for a ride to Vermont. It was a beautiful fall day, and the foliage was just beginning to show its autumn colors. To get there, we passed through many picturesque towns in New Hampshire, including Dublin. Although it had been laid out as a land grant earlier, it was settled in 1760 by Scots-Irish settlers, just like Londonderry, Derry and Antrim, New Hampshire. These are just some of the towns given names to reflect their Scots-Irish heritage.

Although it is a tiny little town, Dublin is famous as the home of the Dubin Prep School, and the home of Yankee Publishing (Yankee magazine, the Old Farmer's Almanac, and countless other books on New England life and culture). It is a summer community for many families, with summer cottages along Dublin Lake, which is at the base of Mount Monadnock. Mark Twain summered here for two years in a row.

The community blackboard on the Yankee Publishing building

Just because I'm nosy, I looked up the name on the community blackboard, and you can find the obituary here at the New York times archives (click on the photo above to enlarge it). Mrs. Nitzburg was obviously a well known and much loved summer resident of Dublin. http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/nytimes/obituary.aspx?n=patricia-nitzburg&pid=145772353



Dublin Public Library

For more information:

http://www.townofdublin.org/Pages/index The website for Dublin, New Hampshire

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Heather Wilkinson Rojo, "Not So Wordless Wednesday- Dublin, New Hampshire", Nutfield Genealogy, posted 13 October 2010, ( https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2010/10/not-so-wordless-wednesday-dublin-new.html: accessed [access date]).