CHAPTER III MORE REMOTE ANCESTRY Our great-grandfather, on the paternal side, was Alexander McGee of the County Down, Ireland, who came at an early date to this country. Our paternal grandfather, James McGee, died in the Old Country and his widow, whose maiden name was Rachel Ball, married Henry Hall, and in 1848, having lost her second husband in Ireland, came to this country and to Iowa. Her two children, Rachel and John Hall, father's half brother and sister, came with her. They made their home at father's for a while. When Rachel married she lived in Dubuque, and the mother made her home with the daughter in Dubuque. This grandmother of ours was a Methodist. At the time the church in Dubuque of that denomination was a very small log structure. Later a small frame building was erected. At both of these churches she attended divine service, but she was laid to rest in Linwood Cemetery before the Main Street Methodist Church was built on the spot where now the beautiful St. Luke's stands. On the maternal side, the line leads back to Samuel Anderson, who was born at sea about 1740, of Irish emigrant parents. He resided near Yorktown, Virginia, and both he and Grandfather McGee participated in the Revolutionary War, on the American side, which fact, in a way perhaps, accounts for W J's intense patriotism. Grandmother Anderson's maiden name was Haggard, whose ancestry reached back many generations to a Welch family of Haggards residing in Wales. They are distinguished particularly for their longevity. She was quite different from John Anderson, her husband, and our grandfather. She did not need to cultivate vim as people do now, for she had it in great abundance. She was rugged and masculine, while grandfather was more delicate, refined, and somewhat effeminate. He could not kill a chicken or any other animal for meat, but his wife, possessing no sentimentality, performed all such tasks as these without a single scruple, even setting broken limbs and bandaging severe wounds when called upon to do so. A first cousin of our mother's, named Nancy Haggard Smith, is living now (1915) at Concord, Minnesota. She celebrated her ninety-seventh birthday in April of this year receiving and answering several hundred congratulation postcards. She reads a great deal without spectacles and feels proud of the fact that she is related to H. Rider Haggard, the novelist of England. Grandfather Anderson lived for a time in Kentucky where, as previously stated, our mother was born. Later he moved with his family to Indiana. His main life work was that of a country school teacher, beginning this work in the year 1800 and according to his diary he was still at it in 1840. The early settlers of these western territories prized education as much as they prized liberty, but they were often very poor and unable to pay the teacher with anything like the promptness such services demanded. This was the case in some of the districts where grandfather taught. He composed some lines in which he reveals his feelings on this subject which I here append: My friends draw near and you shall hear My school is out and there's no doubt, As you have seen, I've faithful been, Both soon and late on you to wait, With much concern, I tried to teach And can assert they learned expert But some will plead "hard times" indeed, Though times are hard upon my word I truly want my pay. I'm some in debt and cannot wait A very long delay; I'll be perplexed and sorely vexed, Lest I intrude, I will conclude And thank you for my pay. Grandfather Anderson had truly a literary turn of mind. He wrote only one book. It is still in the family although it is a very old volume. It is a curiosity in itself, a veritable storehouse of information. One might almost say it touches upon every form and branch of human knowledge: education, medicine, law, agriculture, horticulture, angling, sea-faring, astronomy, machinery, slavery, banks and banking, politics, society, government, science, art, and religion. In it we find interesting articles written on beauty, friendship, ridicule, envy, curiosity, honor, forgiveness, quarrels, pity, love, marriage, patriotism, honesty, courtship, happiness, conceit, and many other topics interesting and instructive. There are some very good ballads, addresses, hymns, essays, letters, and poems. The verses I am using in these reminiscences of course are not claimed by him as poetry. He calls it all doggerel. He merely jots down his impressions and feelings in these verses without much regard to rhyme, feet, measure, or poetry in true sense of the word. All the pieces in the book are interspersed with epigrams, riddles, fables, anecdotes, puzzles, acrostics, proverbs, enigmas, puns, epitaphs, obituaries, and parodies. In the medical department, we find some quaint but rational cures for Asiatic cholera, headache, toothache, cancer, colic, rheumatism, dropsy, white swelling, snakebites, and many others. Most of these, he says, are infallible cures. On the veterinary pages, he looks after the welfare of the horse in particular. In horticulture, to which he gave a great deal of his time, especially during the last years of his life, and in which he was always very much interested, we find methods of tilling the soil, the growing of cabbage, lettuce, melons, onions, turnips, beets, carrots, radishes, and particularly flowers. He was an enthusiastic lover of flowers. The hollyhock was his favorite as it was also the favorite flower of my mother. All his life he showed a passionate fondness for all the beautiful in nature but nothing appealed to him with so much delight as flowers. He communed with them as one is wont to commune with a dear friend. He cared for them as one cares for that which is best loved on earth. In common with his love for flowers he must have loved his vocation teaching public school. A great part of his book is taken up with topics concerned with education. To the modern educator his views on school teaching may seem old-fashioned and queer; but they show the condition of learning west of the Alleghanies, between the years 1800 to 1840, or even later, the period, at least, during which grandfather was in the business. Yet one cannot help feeling in reading his book, that he was abreast of his time in educational matters, that he was exceptionally energetic in his calling, and that he was keenly alive to the importance of bettering the schools in every way possible. In his "Some Sober Thoughts on Keeping School," his "Hints to Parents, Teachers, and Children," his "Address to the Patrons of Schools," and his "Reflections on Turning out Teachers on Holidays," we find he was confronted by some of the same questions which are agitating the minds of the schoolmen of the present time and our school-men of today are just about as near a satisfactory solution of these problems as were the teachers in the early part of the nineteenth century. He must have been particularly interested in mathematics. He discusses the whole subject of Arithmetic and gives unique but simple illustrations of the solution of examples under almost every division of the subject. Bookkeeping, too, is treated at length, and the elucidation of his methods in this art show originality, simplicity, and conciseness. Above all, in everything connected with his teaching he emphasizes neatness, simplicity, accuracy, and dispatch. As a general thing, he seemed to be delighted with his work, and surely no teacher could be more interested in his scholars' welfare than he, yet there were times, when he, like all mortals in every calling in life, seemed to grow weary of his tasks and he was wont then to make a quiet complaint. This was especially noticeable during the last years of his life. On page 39 of his book he writes in 1838, "Only one day more of school and I am glad of it.” |