House guides rose to the bait and clamored for more. My aunt was the author’s first cousin, two generations removed, she explained. Her grandmother and namesake, Charlotte May Wilkinson, was Louisa’s first cousin and childhood playmate.
During our tour of the Orchard House parlor, where Anna Alcott had married John Pratt in 1860, Aunt Charlotte mentioned that her great-grandfather the Reverend Samuel Joseph May had performed the ceremony and signed the marriage license, which still hangs on the wall. Nearby, in the dining room, Aunt Charlotte quietly pointed out to my mother, “There’s the sixth of your sister’s dining-room chairs,” which was somehow separated from its mates in the family shuffle.
It was clear even to a nine-year-old that Aunt Charlotte felt strongly about Cousin Louisa. Born in Syracuse, New York, and raised in 1890s Detroit, my aunt had listened rapt to her grandmother Charlotte’s stories of growing up with her cousin Louisa, whom she outlived by more than three decades. Like Louisa, Aunt Charlotte was devoted to literature, to women’s education, and to equal rights. After graduating from Smith College, in 1917, Aunt Charlotte made her own way in the world, as her cousin had. She emulated Louisa by serving as a Red Cross nurse in Europe during the First World War, and then followed her Aunt Abigail in becoming a city social worker. At least two other women in the family remained single and always worked: Katherine May Wilkinson, a history teacher at the Chapin School who was educated at Smith College (class of 1897) courtesy of the Alcotts (“in return,” according to a family memoir, “for Grandpa [Samuel Joseph May]’s kindnesses” to Abigail), and Katherine’s sister Marion, who ran an inn overlooking Province-town Harbor. In the early 1930s Aunt Marion passed the inn to her niece Charlotte, my aunt, who hosted Mary Pickford, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many other guests at the Red Inn.
As a girl I often played on the parlor floor in Aunt Charlotte’s little red house across the road from the inn. Occupied by the tiny windup toys adorning her window sills, I listened to my elderly, childless aunt cluck over our forebears like a hen over her brood. One memorable ancestor was scalped by Indians in seventeenth-century New York, along with all her little children, Aunt Charlotte added, ominously. Another ancestor was a Salem witch judge who realized his mistake and repented for hanging innocent people as witches. He wore penitential sackcloth for the rest of his life and became something of a feminist, according to Aunt Charlotte, who clearly loved the witch judge best. These ancestors seemed to be present and familiar to her, as if they were her friends, which in a way, I suppose, they were. While her fascination with dead people seemed ghoulish to a child, I see now that most families have an Aunt Charlotte, the relative who takes the time to learn and share stories about the family’s past.
A few years ago, I found high on a bookshelf the family tree that Aunt Charlotte had handwritten and presented to me on my thirteenth birthday. This volume of names and dates as long ago as the sixteenth century arose from decades of genealogical research by my aunt in North Americaand even Europe, where she explored the Mays’ Spanish-Jewish and Portuguese antecedents. It was only in recent years, as an adult beginning to research the lives of the ancestors she had first described, that I could appreciate Aunt Charlotte’s gift.
Of late I have returned often to Orchard House to read documents, interview experts, and study its collections. The house, which the Alcotts occupied from 1858 until the late 1870s, is only one of many Alcott sites in Concord. Just up the road to the right of Orchard House is Hillside, the house Louisa lived in for three years as a teenager. Nathaniel Hawthorne later renamed it Wayside, the name it bears today. Open to the public and run by the National Park Service,
During our tour of the Orchard House parlor, where Anna Alcott had married John Pratt in 1860, Aunt Charlotte mentioned that her great-grandfather the Reverend Samuel Joseph May had performed the ceremony and signed the marriage license, which still hangs on the wall. Nearby, in the dining room, Aunt Charlotte quietly pointed out to my mother, “There’s the sixth of your sister’s dining-room chairs,” which was somehow separated from its mates in the family shuffle.
It was clear even to a nine-year-old that Aunt Charlotte felt strongly about Cousin Louisa. Born in Syracuse, New York, and raised in 1890s Detroit, my aunt had listened rapt to her grandmother Charlotte’s stories of growing up with her cousin Louisa, whom she outlived by more than three decades. Like Louisa, Aunt Charlotte was devoted to literature, to women’s education, and to equal rights. After graduating from Smith College, in 1917, Aunt Charlotte made her own way in the world, as her cousin had. She emulated Louisa by serving as a Red Cross nurse in Europe during the First World War, and then followed her Aunt Abigail in becoming a city social worker. At least two other women in the family remained single and always worked: Katherine May Wilkinson, a history teacher at the Chapin School who was educated at Smith College (class of 1897) courtesy of the Alcotts (“in return,” according to a family memoir, “for Grandpa [Samuel Joseph May]’s kindnesses” to Abigail), and Katherine’s sister Marion, who ran an inn overlooking Province-town Harbor. In the early 1930s Aunt Marion passed the inn to her niece Charlotte, my aunt, who hosted Mary Pickford, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many other guests at the Red Inn.
As a girl I often played on the parlor floor in Aunt Charlotte’s little red house across the road from the inn. Occupied by the tiny windup toys adorning her window sills, I listened to my elderly, childless aunt cluck over our forebears like a hen over her brood. One memorable ancestor was scalped by Indians in seventeenth-century New York, along with all her little children, Aunt Charlotte added, ominously. Another ancestor was a Salem witch judge who realized his mistake and repented for hanging innocent people as witches. He wore penitential sackcloth for the rest of his life and became something of a feminist, according to Aunt Charlotte, who clearly loved the witch judge best. These ancestors seemed to be present and familiar to her, as if they were her friends, which in a way, I suppose, they were. While her fascination with dead people seemed ghoulish to a child, I see now that most families have an Aunt Charlotte, the relative who takes the time to learn and share stories about the family’s past.
A few years ago, I found high on a bookshelf the family tree that Aunt Charlotte had handwritten and presented to me on my thirteenth birthday. This volume of names and dates as long ago as the sixteenth century arose from decades of genealogical research by my aunt in North Americaand even Europe, where she explored the Mays’ Spanish-Jewish and Portuguese antecedents. It was only in recent years, as an adult beginning to research the lives of the ancestors she had first described, that I could appreciate Aunt Charlotte’s gift.
Of late I have returned often to Orchard House to read documents, interview experts, and study its collections. The house, which the Alcotts occupied from 1858 until the late 1870s, is only one of many Alcott sites in Concord. Just up the road to the right of Orchard House is Hillside, the house Louisa lived in for three years as a teenager. Nathaniel Hawthorne later renamed it Wayside, the name it bears today. Open to the public and run by the National Park Service,
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