52 Ancestors Week 50: Witness to History

 From Amy Johnson Crow: Week 50's theme is "Witness to History." It's important to put our ancestors in context with their time and surroundings. What would your ancestor have witnessed? I encourage you to think beyond the "big events." I think about my farming ancestors and the changes they would have seen in equipment and getting their crops to market.

We didn't start the fire....

    You're going to have that Billy Joel song stuck in your head for a week now and I'm not sorry! Of course I am a bit partial to the Marvel version from last year. Wow. 2019. That seems like ages ago, doesn't it? It's safe to say that we're all witnesses to history--even now as a pandemic ravages most of our planet leaving nothing but destruction in its wake. I'd rather not talk about that as I try to keep my blog light. But, these are the times that try everyone's soul. 

    Major events have occurred throughout our lifetime. There's no avoiding it! In my case, I remember the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986. I was in first grade and a teacher from my state was supposed to see the stars. Fate had other plans. I remember going to classes at Merrimack College the day two planes flew into the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11th, 2001. Events like these are etched into our minds and into our collective consciousness. We always remember where we were, who we were with and even what we had for breakfast that morning. These are all major events of course. What about the small ones? 

 

Witness to many changes in Haverhill!

    Haverhill, Massachusetts has certainly seen small changes over the years that transformed it from a small town along the Merrimack river to an industrial powerhouse earning it the nickname "The Queen Slipper City". You can see the change when you look at the city in the census. I recently started a Haverhill One Place Study on WikiTree. Check it out here. If you look at the census portion, you'll see that the town had a very dramatic growth in population in the early 20th century. It dipped a couple times. But, it always managed to bounce back!

    Witnessing all of the changes from 1920 onward was my grandmother, Olympia. She was born a little over a century ago in Haverhill in April of that year. While she was growing up, she had a front row seat at some of the technological advancements that we definitely take for granted today and even natural disasters that earned their place in local history books.

    Decades before the infamous blizzard of 1978, there was the Haverhill flood of 1936 that killed more than 100 people and left more than 400,000 around the northeast homeless. Witnessing this was my grandmother, who at this point had just graduated Haverhill High a year earlier. What happened was that the Merrimack River overflowed during a storm and whole swaths of the town was inundated with rain. This caused the river to flood whole portions of cities and towns in and around the Merrimack valley.

191 Merrimack St. Flooded.

    The year 1936 was also the height of the Great Depression. So, you can imagine that the flood did not make things easy for the citizens of Haverhill.  My grandmother wasn't the only eyewitness to this event in my family. My other grandmother, my great-grandparents and their relatives saw what was happening firsthand. Can you imagine what was going through their minds? A majority of them were working low income jobs at factories and whatnot since they were immigrants. They probably feared for their livelihood and honestly? Who could blame them?

    Looking at the pictures on the Haverhill Facebook page and watching videos like this and others on YouTube really paints a picture of what happened during those days. The weird thing is that no one in my family ever really talked about the event. When it comes to natural disasters around here, everyone more or less talked about the "Blizzard of 1978". It comes up every single time a snowflake touches the ground!

    It's not like people wanted to forget about the disaster. It's been discussed as recently as ten years ago. Check it out in the Haverhill Gazette or the Lawrence Eagle Tribune.  I suppose bigger events tend to take precedence over a flood that happened in the 1930s. The flood itself was historic and because of it more safeguards were put in place to prevent future flooding of the Merrimack. Did they work? Yes and no. The river has flooded since that time and probably will flood again. The Merrimack Valley is in a bowl and sometimes that bowl overflows and there's not much that can be done to prevent a flood. However, all isn't completely lost. Safeguards and barriers have been put in place along the river to prevent disasters as bad as the Haverhill flood from happening again and they only work if they're properly maintained.

The Felker clan from Haverhill!

    Still, I can't help but wonder what my grandmother and others in my family went through during that terrible time. They obviously survived. There's no question about that. Ironically, things changed for the better. These days the Merrimack floods rarely. The last time it flooded this bad was in May of 2006. Many homes were flooded. But, the loss of life was not as devastating to the community.

    If you find yourself researching Haverhill and the surrounding areas, you may want to keep natural disasters like this in mind. They may yield clues as to what happened to various family members. History often intersects with the lives of everyday people. There's no avoiding it. Lives can change in an instant.

    As for Haverhill, the technology has definitely improved since the 1930s and I hope that nothing this bad happens again. Meanwhile, we are sure to be witnessing more historic events because like the song goes the fire will just go on and on and on.