Genealogy Story – Hattie Giles

 

Recently, I was contacted via my membership in ancestry.com by a lady who had found a photography from 1880 in the $2 bin of an antique store near where she lived. As the photo had a person’s name and date on the back, she was looking for a relative who might like to have it and had found this person in my extended family tree. I was not immediately familiar with the name Hattie Giles, so had to look her up in my tree (which has over 15,000 individuals in it). This is the story of Hattie Giles.

Harriet (Hattie) Giles was born on 22 Jan 1868 in the small town of Montague City, Franklin County, MA. Her parents were Frederick Asa Giles (age 33) and Julia Maria Wright (age 29). Frederick had been born in New York and Julia in Massachusetts (although there was some inconsistency in the places of birth in various documents over the years).

The 1870’s were somewhat tumultuous in the family. In 1874, Frederick and Julia welcomed another daughter, Grace, into the family, but she died just a year later in 1875. Then in 1879, at the age of just 44, Frederick also passed away.

[Hattie Giles]

 

No longer having a father (and source of income) in the family, Julia and Harriet moved in with Julia’s older brother, Charles, and his family who were also living in Montague. In the 1880 census we find in the household, Charles, his wife Martha, their three children (George-17, William-15, Julia-6), Charles’ and Julia’s mother (also named Julia), the widow Julia, and Hattie, then age 12. It was about this time that the above picture of Hattie was taken.

But this arrangement was only temporary. In 1882, Julia remarried, to Joseph Hubbard Root who also lived in Montague City. He was also widowed, his wife having passed away in 1878, and he was 15 years older than Julia. Joseph was now the third father figure in young Hattie’s life, but he, being older, passed away in 1894.

In 1897, at the age of 29, Hattie married for the first time to Gilbert Wilson Richardson. They remained in Montague City and it was there in 1902 that they had a daughter, Christabel. However, the marriage of Hattie and Gilbert did not last and they divorced sometime that decade.

In 1908, Hattie’s mother Julia died at the age of 70. In 1909, Hattie remarried to a Robert Hamilton, he also being divorced from his first wife. Robert adopted Christabel, who was only 8 years old, and changed her last name to Hamilton.

In 1929, Christabel married George Chester Burns. George’s mother and father were already deceased, having died at the ages of 35 and 53 respectively. Being older, they immediately began their efforts to have a family. Their son, George Robert Burns (who went by his middle name Robert to distinguish him from his father), was born 9.5 months later on December 1^st.

Hattie died in 1938 at the age of 70 (just like her mother). Then, in just a short span of time, all the men in Christabel’s life passed away. Christabel’s step-father, Robert passed away in 1944, her biological father, Gilbert, passed away in 1945, and her husband, George, passed away in 1947 at the age of 48. Still a teenager, Robert now had no living grandparents or father and was the only one left in his mother’s life. It’s no wonder that he remained close to her until her eventual passing in 1970.

In 1963, when he was 33, Robert married Carolyn Hill, my first cousin, who was 20 at the time. Being older, it was not a surprise when Robert passed away in 1999 at age 69 (continuing the pattern begun with Hattie’s mother Julia who passed away at 70, then Hattie at 70, and Christabel at 68) as well as the Burns men (who passed away at ages 65, 53, and 48 in the prior three generations).

As a side note, through Hattie’s Wright ancestors, Robert is my wife’s 9^th cousin, once removed. And through the Richardson line he is my 9^th cousin, twice removed. It’s a small world!