This post is dedicated to my great grandmother, Lydia Butcher Seager, in honor of National Woman’s History Month whose mission is to share the stories of women’s lives, and “remembering and recounting tales of our ancestors’ talents, sacrifices, and commitments” to give us inspiration. This is also the first chapter of a family history I am writing entitled, “Coming to America: The Story of the Butcher and Seager Families Who Came across the Sea, in 1873 and in 1893!”
Writing a history about someone, who left no diary, no journal, and very little paper trail, can be a daunting task. In the case of my great grandmother, I had little to work with except, thanks to government records, some census records, an immigration record, and birth, marriage, and death records. And the only tangible item that I inherited from my great grandmother was a silver spoon—part of her wedding trousseau—but her “silver spoon” does not carry the same connotation with the oft said quote “born with a silver spoon in her mouth.”
This traditional English expression was synonymous with wealth. But the opposite is true when one considers Lydia’s humble beginnings in the village of Staplehurst, near Maidstone, Kent County, England where she was born in October of 1845 to James and Frances Sands Butcher. The next forty-seven years of her life were spent in this general area, in the small English villages of Staplehurst, Loose, East Farleigh, Thurnham, and Otham, all situated near the River Medway which runs through the larger city of Maidstone, where Lydia also lived. Rural Kent County was known as the “Garden of England,” with its harvest of fruits, especially apples and cherries, and hops, which are grown mainly in the Medway Valley near the river.
Lydia was the fourth of eleven children. By the time she was five years old, there were seven children in the family, she being the middle child. In 1851, Lydia was living with her maternal grandparents, William and Philadelphia Sands, who worked a ten-acre farm, of which all or part consisted of harvesting hops, in the area of Coxheath in East Farleigh, about two miles from Lydia’s parents.
Family lore recounts that her lot in life was as a child servant to her aging grandparents because she was one of the older and healthier of the Butcher children! According to my Aunt Margaret, whose memories of Grandma Lydia stem from her childhood when Lydia lived with her family, Grandma and Grandpa Sands “made her work hard and she had to wear shoes that were too small . . .” And so began Lydia’s life of servitude--even though the census record labeled her as “granddaughter” she earned the “distinction” of servant—if you could call it that—and of being far more than a granddaughter! Besides helping her grandparents, the elderly great grandmother, Philadelphia Elliot, aged ninety, was also a member of the household and whose demands Lydia, I am sure, probably also catered to.
During her childhood years, Lydia worked in the “hops.” Hops were grown in gardens on wires with lengths of string which trained the hops to grow upwards. The mature hops were harvested, by hand, at the end of the summer. Once picked, the hops were dried in an oast house, which was a barnlike structure, until completely dried and packed for sale. Hops were used in the production of beer.
For the next several years, Lydia served the family perhaps until the time of her Grandma Sand’s passing in 1856 and Grandpa Sands’ remarriage in 1857, at which time she may have returned home to the village of Loose to live with her parents, who, by that time, had added three more children to the already large family! Whatever the case, it would have been a short stay because, by 1861, she, and two of her sisters, Philadelphia and Esther, were living independently of their family, all in their teens working as house servants in Maidstone.
Sixteen-year-old Lydia lived with the Stanger family who resided at 100 Scrub Lane (now called Hammersmith). A little clip from a Kent County newspaper in 1866 refers to her employer, John Stanger, a cab proprietor.
The majority of women or young girls during the nineteenth century worked as house servants. From the book, Annals of Labour, by John Burnett, life as it might have been for Lydia and her sisters is described below:
The hours worked in domestic service, unregulated by any legislation, were undoubtedly longer than in factory work. It was calculated in 1873 that a house-maid's day extended from 6 A.M. until 10 P.M., during which she had two-and-a-half hours for meals and an hour-and-a-half in the afternoon for needlework, a total of four hours "rest." This meant twelve hours of actual work, longer by two hours than a factory woman's day. On Saturday, when the factory hand worked two hours less than usual, the servant worked longer, and on Sunday, when the factory worker could rest completely, the servant was still required to work almost a normal day. Eighty hours of actual work a week, against fifty-six for the factory worker, may well be a fair estimate for the late nineteenth century, and must have been exceeded in many single-handed households.
Lydia, trained as a servant from an early age, may have remained in the employ of the Stanger family up until her marriage, at age 22, in November 1867 to Mr. Edward Seager. It is quite possible that Lydia met Edward through her employer because Edward, who was a coachman for Leeds Castle, was also in the “transportation” business. Leeds Castle was located five miles southeast of Maidstone, where Lydia, Edward, and their firstborn resided on Upper Fant Road.
Leeds Castle
Besides the fact that Lydia was raised by her grandparents under difficult circumstances, rather than by her own parents, added to this plight was her parent’s decision to leave their native England in 1873 with the two youngest children. Her brothers, Williams, James, and John set the precedent leaving in 1870, 1871, and 1872, respectively, while her two older sisters, Philadelphia and Sarah, left in 1874, a year after their parents. All that remained in England were Lydia and one sister, Eliza, but even Eliza was gone by 1880 to immigrate first to New York and then onto Canada. How difficult that may have been for Lydia--to see each of her family members leave one by one!The year 1881 finds Lydia and Edward and their children living in Barty Cottages in Thurnham, northeast of Maidstone and less than five miles from Leeds Castle. Edward, like his wife, was a hard worker attending to three different duties as a groom, gardener, and domestic servant, perhaps continuing in the employ of Leeds Castle, while Lydia was the mother of six, my grandfather, William, and his two younger sisters, who died in infancy, not yet born.
In 19th century Victorian England, servants were divided into two groups, indoor and outdoor. The outdoor servants were the coachman, groom, and in the country, the gardener, as was the case with Edward. The coachman, which was his listed occupation in 1871, required not only maintenance of the coach but also driving the residents from the castle to where they needed to go. As a groom, he looked after the horses, and as a gardener, he was in charge of landscaping and indoor plants. As a domestic servant, which was not an uncommon occupation in the great households of the royalty and gentry who employed large numbers of servants of both sexes, Edward’s duties may have included servitude for a butler, a steward, or a footman, to name a few.
Sometime during the next ten years, the Seager family had moved to Otham, southeast of Maidstone, but five miles southwest of the castle and resided in cottages near Otham Lodge whileEdward continued his occupation as a gardener.
Otham Lodge
Eventually Edward contracted consumption (tuberculosis); and, after twenty plus years of working outdoors, the moist climate may have exacerbated his illness causing him to pass away at the age 46, on September 11, 1892. Within six months of Edward’s death, Lydia, along with her sons Fred, Albert, Sidney, James, and William boarded the ship Gallia as passengers on the bottom level-- otherwise known as “steerage”--travelling with a group of German immigrants. They left on March 4 and arrived nine days later on March 13, 1893, in the New York harbor. Son George had left for America two years previous; and her only daughter Anne had married in the early part of the year, so she remained in England. The circumstances for their travel to America are described below:Immigrants traveled in crowded and often unsanitary conditions near the bottom of steamships with few amenities, often spending up to two weeks seasick in their bunks during rough Atlantic Ocean crossings. Upon arrival in New York City, ships would dock at the Hudson or East River piers. First and second class passengers would disembark, pass through Customs at the piers and were free to enter the United States. The steerage and third class passengers were transported from the pier by ferry or barge to Ellis Island where everyone would undergo a medical and legal inspection. If the immigrant's papers were in order and they were in reasonably good health, the Ellis Island inspection process would last approximately three to five hours.
Although Lydia’s father had passed away ten years before, her mother, Frances, brother Edwin, and sister Sarah were living in Yates County, New York where, by 1900, Lydia and three of her sons, George, James, and William, made their home in the town of Milo, in the countryside of upstate New York whose lush and wooded lowland resembled their native Kent County. Sid and Bert had married and were living with their wives and children in the same town and Fred had returned to England.
Milo, their new home, was a small hamlet of about two dozen houses, a store, a shop, a hotel and possibly a few other industries, was situated near Seneca Lake, part of the “Finger Lakes” region of New York state. When the Seagers arrived, it was one of the larger towns of the county, and was the only one that had a front on the waters of Seneca Lake and also on Lake Keuka, an advantage to the grape production and other fruits that were grown successfully. This became Lydia’s home for the next several years, until all her sons married, with the exception of her bachelor son Jim.
By 1915, Lydia and Jim had followed her youngest son William and his family to Tioga County where William had started his own patented lock and shingle business. When that failed, due to the World War, they returned to Yates County, where Lydia lived for the majority of the remaining years of her life, with the exception of a short period of time in Penn Yan when she lived with her youngest sister, Annie, and again, when age took its toll, was cared for by her daughter-in-law, Ellen (my grandmother), until her death on November 20, 1926 at the age of eighty-one.
Although Lydia was not born with a “silver spoon in her mouth,” she reminds me of the precious metal. Various bible references speak of the refining process of metals, including one in Jeremiah 6:29: “For thou, O god, has proved us: thou has tried us, as silver is tried,” illustrating the kind of trial God's children are called upon to go through. Lydia’s trials or her “refining fire” started at a very young age working as a servant to her grandparents to becoming a widow in her forties. But this “refining fire” made Lydia the kind of person she became. Some of the “silver” qualities I discovered about Lydia were from an interview with my Aunt Margaret Seager Larham:
"Lydia Butcher (grandma) was a wonderful person . . . She was a very good housekeeper and cook. She made beautiful bread and meat was always cooked perfect. . . Grandma was very quiet and neat. You hardly knew she was around and working most of the time.”
So whenever I pass by the “silver spoon” that belonged to my Grandma Lydia, I think of how I not only resemble her in looks, but how I share some of her qualities and that I am passing through my own “refining process” just as she did.
Sources:
1. England Births and Christenings, 1538-1975
2. http://www.britannica.com/
3. 1851 Census of East Farleigh, Kent, England
4. Memories of Margaret Seager Larham Drakely
5. 1861 Census of Maidstone, Kent, England
6. 1866 newspaper article
7. 1867 Marriage Record
8. 1871 Census Maidstone, Kent, England
9. 1881 Census Thurnham, Kent, England
10. http://kspot.org/holmes/kelsey.htmB
11. Burnett, John. The Annals of Labour.
12. 1891 Census of Otham, Kent, England
13. 11 Sep 1892 Death of Edward Seager England, Kent, parish Registers, 1538-1911
14.Aldrich, Lewis Cass, Editor. “History of Milo, NY,” History of Yates County, NY. D. Mason & Co.: Syracuse, NY, 1892.
15. 1900 Census of Milo, Yates, New York
16. 1905 Census of Milo, Yates, New York
17. 1910 Census of Milo, Yates, New York
18. 1915 Census of Barton, Tioga, New York
19. 1920 Census of Jerusalem, Yates, New York
20. 1925 Census of Milo, Yates, New York
21. Obituary of Lydia Butcher Seager
