The Search for My Abandoned Grandmother: A genealogical journey uncovers secret love stories and family mysteries

By Mary Ames Mitchell

A genealogical detective story and tale of lost love. Mary often wondered about her maternal grandmother, Eileen Maud, who died in Great Britain long before Mary’s birth in Pasadena, California. No one dared speak about Eileen Maud in the presence of Mary’s grandfather’s second wife, Fay. The quiet and usually preoccupied Prynce Hopkins appeared to deny his first wife’s existence.
As a young adult, Mary uncovered a scrapbook and learned Prynce secretly archived treasured keepsakes and love poems Eileen Maud had written. When Mary’s mother learned about the scrapbook, she had it destroyed. Then Mary sought out her grandfather’s journals from 1921 to 1933 about the time he married and lost Eileen Maud, only to find the important details mysteriously clipped out, censored. “What secret is my family keeping?” Mary wanted to know. “Is this why my aging mother became so bitter and could be so mean?”
Forty years later, Mary traveled to England in search of her grandmother’s grave. She dug through dusty family records and library archives to piece together the moving love story of her wealthy, American and eccentric grandfather and her traditional, working-class English Midlands grandmother. In the process, Mary learned how, with Upton Sinclair, Prynce Hopkins supported California’s labor uprising in the 1920s, how he became involved with the early psychoanalytical movement in London in the 1930s with Dr. Ernest Jones and Mrs. Melanie Klein, about the progressive schools he built in Paris and Santa Barbara, and why his pacifist and socialist causes led to Eileen Maud divorcing him. After six years of research, Mary nearly came to some wrong conclusions. Then the missing cut-outs from the journal surfaced.
The Search for My Abandoned Grandmother weaves Mary Ames Mitchell’s genealogical detective story with her grandfather’s personal narrative of his life with his first wife. With generosity and tenderness, she unravels spiritual insights and truths about social obligation, personal integrity, and family love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mary Ames Mitchell
• Release date: Feb 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780985053031

Mary Ames Mitchell

Mary Ames Mitchell was born and raised in Pasadena, California. She holds a BA in Art History from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, an elementary teaching credential from USC’s Graduate School of Education, and a BFA in Graphics and Packaging from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She taught elementary school for five years, then worked as a graphic designer for thirty-five years, principally in the video game industry. In 1992, Hope Publishing House launched Mary’s first historical narrative, “The Man in the Purple Cow House.” Peach Plum Press released “The Search for My Abandoned Grandmother” in 2005. Ongoing, Mary publishes her historical research on the website www.CrossingtheOceanSea.com: Little known trivia, legends & mysteries about exploring the Atlantic. She regularly speaks about the subjects of her books in the San Francisco Bay area where she lives with her Welsh corgi.

Book preview

Conductor whistles shrieked, passengers hustled, and brakes hissed from the anxious wheels of the boat-train about to leave for France from London’s St. Pancras station. Seven-year-old Betty May stood on the tips of her toes to kiss her mummy good-bye. Eileen Maud straightened the soft round collar of her daughter’s traveling suit. Her brown eyes moistened. Be a good girl, darling, she said. Chin up, we will be together again in two months.

Betty May’s older brother, Peter, waited anxiously at the top of the train platform. Next to him stood their father, Pryns, and their governess, Popsy. Peter reached down to help his sister up the steps. Once she stood on the landing, he turned her around to face their mother.

The conductor latched the safety gate, tucking them in as the train jerked and lunged forward. Peter gave his sister’s fingers a squeeze. Together, they watched through the lattice as Eileen Maud grew smaller and smaller, shrouded in puffs of steam. Her flowered silk dress fluttered. Her straw sun-hat nearly blew away, but Eileen Maud placed a hand on it. With the other hand, she waved her white handkerchief to say good-bye.

Decades later, Betty May would describe the scene to her own daughter. My mother faded into the distance of the cavernous tunnel as the train left the station. I remember her shrinking until even her large hat ceased to exist.

Pryns ushered his children to their seats. Betty May cuddled up next to him and asked, Why was Mummy crying?

These partings for summer holidays had become customary since Betty May and Peter’s parents divorced three years earlier. But Pryns also noticed the difference in his ex-wife’s behavior. He recorded it in his journal that night. It was as if she were seized with the conviction that it was the last time ever she would see her children, and she broke down in tears.

Eileen Maude and her new husband, Vernon Armitage, were taking their own holiday. They were heading to Ayrshire, Scotland, to visit Eileen’s closest sister, Peggy. Peggy was married to a Scot. On the way, they planned to tour the Lake District.

—

Betty May was my mother. She moved on to the next stage on the day before her eighty-fifth birthday, November 10, 2010. During her last eight years, she lived in a retirement home called Villa Marin in San Rafael, California. It was about three miles north of my house. She liked me to visit her on Sunday mornings. Villa Marin produced a tasty and reasonably elegant brunch. Mom called Sundays Family Day because that is what her father called them when he visited her at St. Michael’s boarding school in England after her mother passed away.

During her last few years, Mom’s perceptions of day-to-day activities became muddy. However, she recalled details of events that happened decades earlier, particularly dramatic and emotional ones like the last time she saw her mother.

In 2006 I asked Mom to repeat the train station story. I had just published a book about my father’s family and was on a new quest to learn more about my mother’s. I hoped by knowing more about my English grandmother, I might understand my English mother better. Mom kept her emotions as well hidden as she kept Eileen Maud’s pearls.

What happened after she drove to Scotland, I asked.

She got sick and died, Mom said. My mother had rheumatic fever as a child, she reminded me, and as a result, suffered from heart disease.

Did you see her when she was sick?

No.

How long was she ill?

I don’t know.

Did she die in Scotland or was she taken back to London?

I’m not sure.

Where is she buried?

I have no idea.

Didn’t you go to a funeral or anything?

No.

So you don’t even know if there is a grave?

No.

Or if she were cremated, or if there is a plaque with her name on it somewhere?

No, dear, nothing!

What year was it?

Still 1933, I believe.

How long after she got sick did she die?

I have no idea.

Mom seemed frustrated by my questions, or maybe frustrated with herself for not remembering the answers to them. She continued anyway. I don’t even know when she died exactly, the date or the month.

Does it bother you not to know where your mother was buried?

Yes, very much so. I’m sorry there is no longer anyone alive whom I can ask. Everyone who would have been around then: my grandparents, aunts and uncles, my old governess, Popsy, they are all gone. I just never thought to ask anyone and now it’s too late.

—

Back in 1975, when I was twenty-four, my mother took my two younger brothers and me to London to meet some of those relatives. My grandmother, née Eileen Maud Thomas, was the second of eight children. That gave my mother loads of cousins and me loads of second-cousins. My mother’s Auntie Joy, who had married my grandmother’s older brother, Harold, was the matriarch of the family by the time of our visit. Joy and Harold used the last name Bissell-Thomas, hyphenating the surnames of Eileen and Harold’s parents. My mother did not know why. Eileen and the rest of the siblings only went by Thomas.

In 1975, Auntie Joy Bissell-Thomas was the only one left who knew our family history. I met her at a family gathering. But at the time, I was not interested in asking about the whereabouts of my grandmother’s remains. Joy and Harold’s daughters, Jill and Camilla, were giving a dinner party in our honor. Twenty or more members of the Thomas family mingled and prattled in Jill’s living room when my mother, brothers and I arrived. I had been in the room perhaps ten minutes – overwhelmed by meeting so many new people – when a tall and distinguished looking woman motioned toward the sofa and beckoned me to sit down next to her.

It’s amazing, Mary, she said, after telling me she was Auntie Joy. You look just like your Grandmother Eileen. That pleased me immensely.

I do not recall all we chatted about, but it included the relationship of our relatives. Together we diagrammed the Thomas Family Tree as Auntie Joy knew it. I drew lines and boxes and filled in names while she dictated. She would nod in the direction of the person she was talking about because it was not polite to point. The family tree only went back in time to the generation of her in-laws, my mother’s grandparents George and Victoria Thomas. In 2006, when I was serious about investigating that diagram, I could not find it.

I recall two other things about that family gathering: my introduction to white bread sauce, which was served as a garnish for roast chicken, and my introduction to the phrase F-H-B.

As we lined up for the buffet, my second-cousin Philippa moved to the back of the line. As she passed me, she said, F-H-B you know.

I must have looked puzzled.

Family hold back, she explained cheerily. Just in case there isn’t enough food. I glanced at the chicken to see how big it was.

—

Ever since learning about our resemblance – though I did not see it – I have had a soft spot for this grandmother I could never know. I have many photographs of her, including the one of her wedding to my grandfather Prynce that graces the cover of this book. I also had the embroidered silk veil she wore in that wedding, but I just sent it to my daughter, Amy, in New York to wear for her own wedding in June. The large rectangle of ninety-year-old silk mesh with its embroidered edge is so delicate, it feels weightless. Holding it is like holding a spider web.

Mom gave me Eileen Maud’s elegant red evening coat, an art deco masterpiece encrusted with gold embroidery. There is no label inside, but Mom believed it came from the House of Worth. The pattern on the silk lining reminds me of drawings I saw in art history classes by the nineteenth-century Scottish designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh [1868-1928]. Two white marten furs surround the neck like a collar, complete with tiny fox-like heads, one peeking down from each shoulder with eerily realistic glass eyes.

I have pressed my nose to the inside of the coat, wondering if the scent is of my Gran. In my imagination, the red silk holds the memory of a glorious time when she must have been one of the most fashionably dressed women in London. There is a wine stain on the front. I cherish that as well, for maybe it is a drop of claret she was drinking one evening with my grandfather back in the 1920s. I have only worn the coat once, to a New Year’s Eve Venetian ball. My mother used to wear it for New Year’s Eve parties, too. She stopped attending parties after she divorced my father in the mid-1960s, when I was thirteen. She claimed she didn’t like parties. I think she didn’t like making small talk.

—

After questioning Mom about Eileen Maud that Sunday in 2006, I decided to take a trip to England to research the Thomas family and to search for my grandmother’s grave. What if she were buried under a beautiful headstone somewhere? I pictured her spirit, still covered in that wedding veil, waiting all those years for her children to visit.

That may seem peculiar to many people in the United States, but there is an Italian cemetery near a place I often go to in Tuscany, where the town-folk visit the memorials of their ancestors on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis. Neither my Uncle Peter nor my mom could have honored their mother in that way, because they did not know where she was. What if no one ever visited her? Would she wait alone throughout eternity? Was she reaching out to me now and asking me to find her, as I believe my father did after he died?

Some people claim there is no connection between the physical world and the spiritual one. However, sometimes, by closing my eyes, I can feel myself enter a different dimension. It feels like the spirits of loved ones who have passed away are there with me. They have joined God’s host, his army of angels, like those so often mentioned in the Old Testament. Some people think angels are God’s ideas. That would mean God was reaching out to me.

—

I started researching my family history twenty years ago to help my son, Jonathan, complete an American history project. His teacher had asked him to create a family tree. I already had a lot of information about my father’s side of the family. His aunt, my great-aunt, spent her entire adult life digging it up. All I needed to do was extract from under my bed the box filled with papers she had sent me. Jon’s task – probably the motive for the assignment – was to sort it out and make the charts.

We also had information on my mother’s paternal side. Though Eileen Maud was English, my mother’s father, Prynce Hopkins, was born and raised in California. He traveled to London after World War I, which is when he met and married my grandmother. His American family is well documented. They descended from more than a dozen of the 102 passengers on the 1620 voyage of the Mayflower. Anyone can purchase the thick, silver-covered book that the Mayflower Society compiled with all the information.

I grew the chart that Jon created, which started out as four pages, to more than seventy. Filling in the missing blanks was as much fun for me as going on a treasure hunt or solving a murder mystery. I found myself wanting to know why my early American ancestors came to this country. What religions did they follow? Why did they risk their lives and leave their cultures to move here?

I was particularly interested in their religious beliefs. How did my beliefs relate to theirs? I had been searching for a feeling of foundation in my own studies since I was five and attended Sunday School at the local Congregational Church. I had no idea that my ancestor, William Brewster, was responsible for bringing the Congregational Church to America.

On both my mother’s and fathers sides, I uncovered over 180 great…grandparents who sailed to New England between 1620 and 1640. That small window in time is referred to by New England historians as The Great Migration even though there have been many migrations to America. My father never knew he was my mother’s thirteenth cousin.

I have driven around the country looking for ancestral gravestones. I have sought them as far west as Santa Barbara, California, and as far east as Shelter Island in New York. In Boston and New York, I have walked the trails my ancestors William Dawes, Henry Knox and Thomas Knowlton trod during the American Revolution. Recently I flew to Aberdeen, Scotland, in search of the grave of an ancestor buried there 400 years ago.

Each time I visit a place where a forebear lived and breathed, I feel an eerie connection to my heritage. For example, Prynce’s seventh great-grandfather (my ninth great-grandfather) Edmund Freeman, was buried on a mound in Sandwich at the northwest corner of Cape Cod. His tombstone rests on the foundation of the house in which he resided 370 years ago. I read about it when I was researching Edmund in the genealogy library of the Mayflower Society in nearby Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The directions to the site written up in the Freeman Genealogy were vague. It took me three days to find the narrow path through the quiet wood leading to the top of the mound. When I did, it was dark. Fortunately, the inn where I was staying provided me with a flashlight. I followed the path to a ten-foot square clearing surrounded by a wood rail fence. In the middle of the clearing, cemented into a large granite rock, stood the brass plaque marker donated by one of Edmund’s numerous descendants.

As I sat on the cold stone and smelled the damp leaves scattered on the clearing around me, I looked up at the stars and imagined old Edmund there with the other angels – wearing a beard, perhaps – looking down on me fondly and patting me on the shoulder. I’m proud of you, Mary, he was saying. Thank you for paying me some respect. Edmund lived hundreds of years ago, yet he led a life as significant as the life I am leading now. Because of that grave marker, and because his descendants researched and recorded his life, he has not been forgotten.

I wonder if it is a common trait among genealogists to worry about being forgotten. My legacy to my two children, so far, will be the book I wrote about my dad and this book about my grandmother. That will do for starts.

—

When I began my research in preparation for my trip to England, I knew of only two sources of information about my grandmother and her family – not counting my mother as a source. A third source existed once, but it had been destroyed.

The first source was my grandfather’s autobiography published in 1962 when he was seventy-seven years old. It is titled Both Hands Before the Fire. I read my copy some thirty-five years earlier after Grandpa passed away in 1970 at the age of eighty-five – the same age my mother almost was when she died. I was certain Grandpa’s autobiography did not reveal where my grandmother was buried. However, I hoped a second reading might uncover some clues I had missed during the first go-around.

The second source was a set of journals my grandfather wrote. He completed one book about every two to four years. I have completed nearly that many scrapbooks about my life. I heard my mom speak about the journals, but I had never seen them. Grandpa willed the books to the care of his youngest daughter, Mom’s half-sister, my Aunt Jennifer. Jennifer was twelve years younger than Mom. Jennifer kept the journals in a storage locker near her home in Seattle. That meant that they were not within easy reach for me in San Rafael. Maybe if I call her, I thought, she might loan me the journal covering 1933.

—

The third source of information that once existed was a large scrapbook containing the correspondence of my grandmother to my grandfather during their life together. I ran across it while I was visiting my grandfather on a Thanksgiving or Christmas holiday during my high school years in the late 1960s. It was after my parents’ divorce. By then Grandpa lived in a modern, mostly glass home built by an award-winning architect in Santa Barbara, California. Santa Barbara was a two-hour drive north of the home where my mother, my brothers and I lived in Pasadena.

One afternoon, having nothing else to do, I came across the scrapbook while perusing my grandfather’s extensive library. I was often on my own since I was the oldest grandchild – age sixteen-ish – and the only girl. My brothers were off playing with our even younger cousin, Thayer (Aunt Jennifer’s son). As I thumbed through the books, I spotted the wide volume under a pile of oversized art books stacked sideways on the bottom shelf.

Who can resist looking through a scrapbook? Especially one that you have discovered in your grandfather’s house? Instead of photos pasted to pages, I found personal letters, often with their envelopes, and a collection of small blue sheets on which had been written short poems. I read through four or five pages before it dawned on me that the author of the letters and poems was my grandmother, Eileen Maud. Once this realization occurred, I felt as guilty as I did when I rifled my mother’s wallet for money.

There was an unwritten rule in my grandfather’s house. No one was to mention Eileen Maud. The reason for that was the same reason my mother never learned the whereabouts of her own mother’s grave. My grandfather’s second wife, Fay, was an extremely jealous woman.

Blonde, beautiful, brilliant and manipulative Fay married my grandfather in London the same year my brunette grandmother died. By that time Grandpa had been living in England as an ex-patriot for thirteen years. In 1940, after the German’s began attacking London, my grandfather shipped his new wife, their two-year-old daughter Jennifer, and my then fourteen-year-old mother to his home in California. He wanted to get them out of harm’s way.

Peter, on the other hand, who was sixteen, stayed behind. My mother told me it was under the pretense he was eligible for the service. She thought the real reason was that his new stepmother did not want him around. I would learn there was another reason as well. Mom did not see her brother again for ten years. She lost touch with her maternal grandparents completely. The only friends and relatives who kept in reliable contact with her were a schoolmate from St. Michaels named Rosemary and her two cousins Jill and Camilla.

Fay was twenty years younger than my grandfather. In 1943, she had a son with him they named David. In 1948, Fay divorced Grandpa. She was forty-three and moved on to the first of four more husbands. Grandpa was sixty-three when Fay divorced him. He never remarried. In fact, he remained under Fay’s spell until the day he died. He bequeathed to her one-fourth of his good-sized fortune.

From 1948 to Grandpa’s death in 1970, Fay continued to attend Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays at the Santa Barbara house. She often brought her current spouse. No matter what the legal papers said, Fay remained the queen of the roost. When she was around, my mother stayed in the shadows. Like for Cinderella, Mom seemed to have had no mother of her own.

Knowing all this, the scrapbook surprised me. Why had my grandfather gone to so much trouble to have my grandmother’s letters bound into a book so carefully and lovingly? Since no one ever spoke about my grandmother around me, it had not occurred to me that my grandfather truly cared for her. I held in my lap the history of their love affair, something I had not acknowledged before. What joy to find that she, like many other people in my family, liked to write poetry.

One particular poem caught my attention. In rhyme, Eileen Maud told Prynce that she loved him very much. However, it made her sad that he spent so much time away from her with his activities and social causes. The poem affected me deeply because one of the reasons my own parents got divorced was my father’s obsession over his social causes. They distanced him from us, the family who really needed him.

I read through the letters and poems for about fifteen or twenty minutes before I heard my relatives coming up the stairs close to where I sat. Fearing that Fay was among them, I quickly closed the scrapbook and stowed it back into the bookshelf. In my haste I placed it on top of the art books instead of underneath. When I returned to look for it again, it was gone.

The scrapbook resurfaced when my grandfather died a few years later. I was in college by then. As one would expect, he left the book to my mother. In a reaction that I knew to be typical of her – she did not deal with emotional issues – Mom refused to look at the book.

I was so afraid to open up the painful memories that I asked Jennifer to destroy it, she told me.

When I asked Jennifer about it, hoping she had secretly rescued the scrapbook and was hiding it somewhere, she said, I remember when your mother did that. Your Uncle David and I could not believe she wanted us to throw the scrapbook away. Today I wish we hadn’t.

I was angry with my mother. Why didn’t she think about me and that I might have wanted that scrapbook? I was devastated I would never have the chance to read the rest of the poems. I did not tell my mother that. I had learned early in life to keep a cork on my feelings. When I showed emotion, my mother became uncomfortable. Calm down, Mary, she would say before changing the subject.

That left me, in 2006, with Grandpa’s autobiography, Both Hands Before the Fire, and his journals. He had written other books about religion, philosophy, his travels and his causes. I have eleven of them in my library, but none mention my grandmother. As far as I knew, my grandmother herself left no more written records behind.

This book has two time lines:

1) My modern-day investigation into the death of my grandmother and meeting my English family.

2) My grandparents’ story as my grandfather described it in his journals and autobiography.

We will start with the oldest information I have, the history of my mother’s Hopkins family. The chart below shows my family tree as I knew it when I began my search. Bolded names indicate people I mention in my stories.

Prince Charles Hopkins, circa 1925. Photo: author’s collection.

Prince / Pryns / Prynce / Prence

My grandfather was named Prince Charles Hopkins at his birth on the fifth day of March 1885 in Oakland, California. His life was never ordinary. He frequently challenged the status quo. When he died eighty-five years later, his obituary in the Santa Barbara News Press stated he had traveled to every country in the world – an exaggeration maybe, but not by much.

His parents named him Prince after his paternal great-grandfathers, Prince Hopkins and Prince Hawes. The Princes were distant cousins. They both descended from and were named after Thomas Prence, who was the governor of Plymouth Colony back in the 1600s.

My grandfather’s middle name, Charles, came from his father. His surname had been carried to America with Stephen Hopkins eight generations earlier. Stephen also brought with him the Hopkins travel gene.

Stephen Hopkins sailed to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1610 on the SeaVenture. She hit a hurricane and wrecked on the uninhabited island of Bermuda. All 150 passengers made it safely ashore. The castaways lived on the island for ten months. During that time they built two ships: one from wood salvaged from the SeaVenture, and one from the cypress wood grown on the island. Most of the 150 castaways finally sailed to Jamestowne.

Some time after, Stephen learned from a ship passing through that his wife Mary had died in England before she could sail to America with their two children to join him. Stephen returned to England. He married Elizabeth Fisher as his second wife. They had two daughters: Elizabeth and Damaris. No one knows what happened to the daughter Elizabeth, maybe she died young. In 1620, Stephen purchased passages on the Mayflower for his new wife – who was pregnant – their daughter Damaris, and his children from his first wife, Mary: Giles and Constance.

Mid-Atlantic during the voyage, Elizabeth gave birth to a boy she and Stephen named Oceanus, for obvious reasons. The family made it safely to Plymouth and survived the brutal first winter. Their descendants would later intermarry with descendants of their fellow Mayflower passengers: William Brewster, Edward Doty, John Howland, Francis Cooke and Elizabeth Tilly to create my grandfather.

Thomas Prence arrived to Plymouth in 1621 on the Fortune along with William and Mary Brewster’s son, Jonathan. Twenty-one-year-old Thomas was a carriage maker from London. In August of 1624, he married Patience Brewster, the daughter of the aforementioned William Brewster, who was the religious leader of the colony. Patience and her sister had sailed to Plymouth on the ship Anne in 1623 to join their parents. Thomas and Patience’s wedding was the ninth recorded in Plymouth Colony. Thomas would serve several terms as the colony’s governor before Plymouth Colony became part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691{1}. Because of that, hundreds of Prence’s descendants named their sons Prence or Prince in his honor. My grandfather was the fifth Prince Hopkins in his family line.

My grandfather’s family cluster of Pilgrim ancestors settled on Cape Cod. The tight and incestuous community lived there from 1630 to the end of the Revolutionary War – 174 years. The first member christened Prence Hopkins{2} was born in 1731 in Harwich, just west of the Cape’s elbow. Prince I changed the spelling of the name when he named his own son Prince II in 1768. (The Pilgrims did not use Roman numerals to label descendants, but for clarity I have added them.) Prince II was also born in Harwich. He worked as a whaler, which was a common occupation for Cape Cod residents at the time. According to family lore, he barely survived a shipwreck on one of his voyages. Because of that, his wife Phoebe determined to move to a place where her sons would not go to sea. When the Revolutionary War ended and new lands opened up for settling in Maine and upstate New York, Prince II and Phoebe moved off the Cape. By that time both sets of their parents had died, which probably made the transition easier. This was the fifth generation from that which arrived on the Mayflower, the Fortune and the Anne.

—

Growing in my front yard today is a damask rose that is a descendant of a cutting of a damask rose that Prince II and Phoebe took with them to Maine from Cape Cod. The rose constantly reminds me how panning for ancestors often turns up lovely gold nuggets. During my genealogical research, I connected with a sixth-cousin named Helen who lived in Redding, California, about four hours away from me. Helen was also a descendant of Prince II and Phoebe.

Helen had been carrying out her own research. According to her family lore, Prince II and Phoebe’s home in New Sharon was marked by a tangle of damask roses that had come from the Cape. When Helen discovered that the same rose decorated the garden of the Joshua Hopkins House on Cape Cod Hill Road in New Sharon, Maine, she contacted the current owner. He offered to send from Maine to Redding a cutting of the rose. Helen planted the cutting in her garden where it flourished so well she frequently cut it back so it would not overflow its allotted plot. In turn, Helen sent me my own cutting of the rose.

—

Prince II and Phoebe Hopkins arrived in New Sharon, Maine, in 1804 where Prince II became a farmer. Six years later he and Phoebe named their seventh child Prince. Prince III was my grandfather’s grandfather.

Before the birth of Prince IV, Prince III moved to the newly formed mill town of North Vassalboro, Maine, twenty-one miles northwest of New Sharon. It was an easy day-trip in a horse and buggy. There he married Betsy Hawes. Betsy’s parents, Prince and Betsy Hawes, had also moved from Cape Cod. They had left Yarmouth on the Cape in 1802, two years before Prince Hopkins II moved his family to New Sharon. The families probably knew each other well before they settled in Maine. Prince Hawes served as an elder in the Congregational Church and helped found Vassalboro’s new congregation there.

By 1850, Prince III had helped establish a hardware store and successful tannery business with a fellow named Jacob Southwick. They called their company Southwick & Hopkins. The Illustrated History of Kennebec County, Maine{3} stated that the tannery was the life of North Vassalboro. It stood on Getchel’s Corner, which had been named after another man who had moved there from Cape Cod.

Prince III and Olive produced five children that we know of. Their first, born in 1837, became my great-grandfather, Charles Harris Hopkins. Not until their fourth child (third son) did they choose the name Prince [IV]. That was in 1842. Throughout my family tree, middle names became popular then. The Hopkins tree was no exception. Prince IV’s middle name was Leroy.

Sadly, Prince Leroy died at the age of four in 1849. His first name did not go to waste. His parents used it as a middle name for their next child born in 1853, George Prince, who was also named after Olive’s brother, George Hawes. George Prince{4} never married. His brother Charles used the name for his son, Prince Charles Hopkins [V].

My grandfather never knew the origin of his first name. During the course of his life he spelled his name Prince, Pryns, and Prynce, but never Prence as in Thomas Prence. When he married my grandmother, he changed the spelling from Prince to Pryns. At about the time he married Fay, he switched to Prynce. I will use the spellings that correspond to those time periods as much as possible. Truth is, the spelling confusion is a biographer’s nightmare.

Notes

{1} Plymouth only had six governors before it merged with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690.

{2} Prince I was the great-grandson of Stephen Hopkins and Thomas Prence.

{3} Illustrated History of Kennebec County, Maine. ed. Henry D. Kingsbury, Simeon L. Deyo. New York: H. W. Blake & Company, 1892.

{4} Since Prince was George’s middle name, I did not give him a Roman numeral. This was confusing enough as it was.

If you double tap any image in this ebook, you can make it larger and easier to read.

The author’s mother, Betty May, and Lenny the cat, 2005 Photo: author’s collection.

Planning My Trip

I began planning my trip to England and Scotland in May of 2006 having no idea what a treat I had in store for me. My grandmother-search project would eventually encompass three trips to England and two trips to Scotland. I would visit three of my mother’s first-cousins, eight of my second-cousins, fifteen of my second-cousins-once-removed and five step-cousins. Some of the cousins I had already met. Some became new friends. First on my list were Mom’s first-cousin Camilla and Mom’s school chum, Rosemary. I knew both of them relatively well.

I wanted to take advantage of a three-week break in my work schedule starting in July. That left me with two months to organize – a particularly short time since my passport had expired and the normal turnaround time for renewal was eight weeks.

I had accumulated enough free miles for my airfare. Mom offered to fund the rest. I asked her if she wanted to go with me.

I don’t think I can make it, dear. I worry about all the walking, and going up and down steps. You go ahead. I’ll hear all about it when you get back. Stepping up onto a curb for my mother was as intimidating as climbing Mt. Everest to me.

Crippled people travel in wheelchairs, you know, I pointed out.

Yes, I know. Maybe someday. Bring me back a bottle of Marmite.

Mom grinned knowing I found Marmite revolting. Marmite is a bitter, sticky brown goo that comes in a small oval jar and tastes similar to the beef extract we Americans use to season stews and soups. It is made from yeast and the British love it spread on toast. An American friend of mine thinks it tastes like ground cockroaches.

While I worked out the details of my travel plans, I continued my research. Three weeks would not give me enough time to scour every cemetery in England or Scotland. I needed to whittle down the prospects.

A few days later I happened across an article in the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday travel section on Highgate Cemetery in London. Buried within Highgate’s thirty-seven acres are George Eliot, Karl Marx, the poet Christina Rosetti and Charles Dickens’ younger brother Alfred, among other notables. As the article described, it is London’s most famous dead end, with tens of thousands of graves.

Highgate is situated near the home where my mother, Peter, Eileen Maud and Vernon Armitage were living at the time of Eileen Maud’s death. (Pryns and Fay were living on Portland Place.) Mom always referred to the home by its address, 62 Ellsworthy Road. Its proximity to Highgate recommended the cemetery as a likely place to find Eileen Maud’s grave. I assumed Vernon had enough money to provide his wife with a proper burial because my mother’s childhood memories of 62 Ellsworthy Road included an upstairs maid, an Irish downstairs maid who was the same age as Peter, a cook, a nanny, and a chauffeured Bentley.

I noted Highgate’s street address and website and read the instructions on how to request a search for someone buried there. This led to my first hurdle. Like most ancestral research requests, Highgate required a search fee and a self-addressed stamped envelope. All my previous research had been within the United States. How was I supposed to obtain and send £10 sterling to England? How was I going to obtain English stamps to stick on a return envelope to the United States?

A clerk at the San Rafael Post Office informed me of the proper procedure for the second problem. To obtain return postage from another country, one must purchase an international postal coupon. Unfortunately, the coupons available at his branch were out of date and unusable. He suggested I try another branch.

I told Mom about Highgate the following Sunday. Then I asked her to tell me more about life on Ellsworthy Road. She sat back in her dining chair to think a minute. Then she sat up suddenly with her eyes flashing like a bright-idea meter.

Why don’t you call my brother, Peter? she said, almost excitedly. "Maybe he knows what happened to our mother."

Peter had moved to Canada after World War II. For a long time he worked as a controller for a number of hotels. By 2006 he was retired and living with his third wife, Josée, near Quebec. They had been married for forty years. Though Peter had several children with previous wives, he and Josée had no children together. I had only seen him three or four times in my life, but I always found him to be warm, friendly and compassionate.

The last time Mom had seen Peter was when he and Josée visited her in Pasadena. That was roughly 1993. Mom moved to Villa Marin in 2003. Until she died, she and Peter called each other every birthday. I think their bond grew stronger as their health grew weaker, knowing one might not be around when it was time