My Family and Poe

After my Grandfather’s death, I inherited his library. The bequest was informal and drip fed to me as a child when I was taken to visit my Grandmother. I always came away with one of his books.

He had been a schoolmaster in a quarry village and buried long before I was born. Taid (Welsh for grandfather) had been a bibliophile and from an early age I demonstrated the same genetic trait. My grandmother perhaps hoped by using this incantation of gifts he might be reincarnated.

One book in particular was prized.

This was a book of poems by Edgar Alan Poe, a deep scarlet bound, battered edition. I was encouraged to learn the poems by heart. I carried it out with me into the World, and the steady metre and internal rhymes remain sheltered in a small corner of my mind.

It is only recently that I have discovered the book’s true history; its provenance revealed by an inscription inside the cover.

Taid’s uncle in New York gave it to him; the gesture reflecting a family bond, that whilst separated by the Atlantic Ocean, had been strengthened by family tragedy.

Uncle Ebenezer had left for the slate mines of New York State in 1890. The following year, his sister, my great grandmother was widowed after a horrific quarry accident in Wales. Taid was only a small baby and was left without his father. The handwritten inscription gives no date for the book’s gift but records that Ebenezer was still living in Granville, a slate mining area in the upper part of the state. He was to move to New York, and is recorded as resident there by 1915, so the gift predates that year. The book represented something important in my family history and I needed to find out more.

Whilst researching this, another Poe driven offshoot of a tale suddenly emerged so full of coincidence it proved too attractive a genealogical rabbit hole.

It began when my brother telephoned me to tell me about various documents he had found in his attic.

It also involved a field.

Where my brother lives on the island, he is surrounded by fields, but there was a particular one, cosied up to his rabbit plagued garden which possessed a view. Looking out from his window, the land stretches to the sky or the sea that is so far away you can’t really tell which one it is.

Amongst some attic family papers, my brother had discovered both a marriage and death certificate, the names on them unrecognisable but the address shown was the local farm which owned the coveted field and its forever view..

I wish I could tell you it was Aunt Annable Lee, but it was instead Ellen Ann. I was able to confirm, in the face of my brother’s mounting excitement, she was the aunt of our grandfather, Moi Jones, the schoolteacher and lover of books.

Good old Aunt Ellen Ann had succeeded, in 1910, in marrying Owen, the farmer who had owned my brother’s next-door field. This was amazing news, a bolt from the attic. There had been no hint of any family ties to the island, never mind historic ownership of land. But we were talking about the island and family connections carried unusual weight. It might even have been Aunt Ellen Ann’s favourite field. Might there be another family gift in the offing?

For some reason her marriage to Owen took place in Toxteth in Liverpool but Aunt Ellen Ann was working as a domestic servant in the city. Whilst she was born in the mountains of Wales, Liverpool during the late 19th Century had been partially colonised by run off population from its slopes. These immigrants arrived with their language, chapels and eisteddfodau and quickly formed thriving communities that only gradually in time faded away.

Aunt Ellen Ann may have caught the aging baritone Owen’s wandering eye as he visited Liverpool on a rare trip for him off the island; possibly during a Gymanfa Ganu, which is a Welsh congregational singing event and very cultural but with very passionate undercurrents. When you’re singing a good hymn, as they say......

Owen was, in any event, smite by the exotic city girl and he quickly carried her back to his distant farm on the island.

Anyway, this seemed a result as far as the field was concerned.

But Owen died of a stroke whilst sitting on his threshing machine in 1917.

Moi Jones my grandfather was at that moment fighting for his country and life as an artillery man in the poppy fields of Flanders and whilst Owen’s sudden death did in the course of time change our family’s fortunes, I suspect Moi had other matters on his mind.

But did Aunt Ellen Ann inherit the field? What family ties were there to that spectacular view?

Owen left no children and Aunt Ellen Ann was described as a 47-year-old spinster on the marriage certificate, a little late to expect another fresh green branch on our family tree.

Instead, from an initial inspection of Owen’s Will it was dominated by hordes of nieces and nephews, enough to populate a small village on the island, although Owen did leave a specific bequest to his widow, his precious threshing machines.

I like to think, that just before she doubtless sold them, Aunt Ellen Ann took the one Owen had last occupied with his backside, if only to drive around the narrow island lanes with her embalmed late husband on the back to make her point.

Aunt Ellen Ann and Owen were married for seven riotous years, but in death he was intent on making sure she didn’t share such experiences with anyone else. He wanted to remain in that farming driving seat from beyond the grave.

His will provided that she could enjoy the fruits of the farm only until she remarried, then it was to be pay off time. She would be provided with a £400 severance payment and it was Sayonara, Ellen before the whole farm was surrendered to the swarm of nephews and nieces

And so, whilst ultimately the field was lost to another family’s history, Aunt Ellen Ann didn’t remarry and continued to enjoy the fruits of the farm until her death.

Despite my frustrated research into the field, it was however to yield a family secret with another strange Poe connection.

That Aunt Ellen Ann nursed a terrible fear in death.

It’s called Taphophobia.

Edgar Alan Poe sums it up in this way.

‘The true wretchedness is to be buried while still alive.’

This is from Poe’s story ‘Premature Burial’.

You only have to google the words to discover it was a fairly widespread phobia during late Victorian times; the fear of being buried when you hadn’t died. It is well known Chopin, Hans Christian Anderson and other famous dignitaries of the time left instructions seeking to avoid being interred alive.

Staying in hotel rooms on holiday and propping cards up before sleep saying ‘I’m not dead’ intended for over busy staff or maids who might jump to conclusions if you’re a heavy sleeper, decapitation before burial, severing of arteries to ensure death, it was all there. Final directions drafted into wills and instructions left in sealed letters reflected haunted thoughts that led to a myriad of alarms and bells fitted to so called ‘safety coffins’ capable of being activated by the reawakened corpse and intended to alert gravediggers and sharp eared clergy intoning a final farewell over a well filled hole in the ground.

‘Help, please don’t leave me. I’m not dead.’

I discovered this was echoed in Aunt Ellen Ann’s thoughts as she ruminated on her burial.

I could only suspect that Uncle Ebenezer in New York might have had a hand in this. He had given a book of Poe’s poems to my grandfather. The evidence was on my bookshelf. It was a simple deduction that another book, this time of Poe’s stories had winged its way across the Atlantic to Taid’s aunt on the island farm and which left her traumatised after reading it one dark night after Owen’s threshing had died down.

So, did Poe’s story worm its way into her deepest fears?

The fact it did is clear from her own Will, a copy of which I secured whilst on the track of whether those threshing machines may have figured in her own legacy. She made this provision.

‘I direct that after my death Dr * * E***** of **** **** or the doctor attending me at the time of my death, shall sever one of my arteries and make certain I am dead…’

She provides a sum of £20 be given to the doctor who provides this service.

Her will is dated in 1941 and is so distant from the gothic beliefs of the previous century. The fear of premature burial must surely have receded with the development of modern medicine and the birth of the NHS was only a few years away when Aunt Ellen Ann died in 1942.

It remained a puzzle and I wondered whether the answer was on the island itself?

Who was Dr E****** the medical practitioner who Aunt Ellen Ann was confident would perform this bizarre and archaic ritual upon her in death?

Oral history on the island possessed a long memory.

Informal enquiries revealed that Dr E****** died of a burst appendix soon after her death, presumably after earning his £20.

I learnt his widow A****** was so committed to his patients she continued the medical practice after his death using locums. As these doctors were strangers to the island, she would often guide them to patient’s homes, using a lamp to light their way to the most hidden away addresses at night.

The island’s very own Florence Nightingale ended her days in a local nursing home aged 104 years.

Those that knew her in old age told me she had referred to the procedure Aunt Ellen Ann had asked to be performed on her after her death as one that remained ‘in vogue’ on the island during her husband’s time. A time long after Poe’s writing that contributed towards this nineteenth century phobia and I doubt that even Edgar Alan Poe had that many dedicated readers on the island even then.

Copyright: Moibach 2022.