Tag / braintree

by Mary James

9. Posture Parades, a Field Trip, a Binder Full of Family, & the 13 Colonies

I was wrapping up the ‘The Early Years’ section, with Helen exiting the U.S. for the first time in the early 1930s to voyage around Central America, but then two things happened. One Google thing, and the other a weekend upstate where Helen was born and spent summers.

Posture Parades

While Googling schools where Helen taught, I found a write up by her in a yearbook online. It declares, “Miss Helen Skinner, Director of Physical Education, Gulf Port College, Gulfport, writes, ‘Sailing, canoeing, surfboard riding, boat trips to Ship Island for swims in the surf, bicycle trips, long walks on the sea wall, picnics on the beach, moonlight horseback rides — these are some of the activities that make the Athletic Association at Gulf Park one of the most popular and important organizations on the campus. We are proud of our 100 per cent attendance…at our third Annual All-School Play Day…competition was keen and colorful in tennis, golf driving, ping-pong, deck tennis, horseshoe pitching, posture parade.’*

*Posture parade!

The below looks like she is dressed for one of those moonlight horseback rides, no?

Helen Skinner, 1936, Gulf Port College, Mississippi

A Field Trip, a Binder Full of Family, & the 13 Colonies

Charlton, New York, where Helen spent summers, have an historical society. I messaged them on Facebook. They wrote back, saying they would look into the names I mentioned.

I wrote again about a month later when I was planning a trip, asking if I could say hi. Unbeknownst to me, they had been digging deep into the families and had surfaced with a boat load of facts and connections going all the way back to Braintree, England in the 1500s. And found that the Skinners were settlers in the first 13 colonies.

They researched, typed, scanned, organized, printed, and presented it in a binder. It has copies of census records, wills, cemetery plots, inventories, property records, bibles, birth records, death records, etc. Thank you to Erin Miller at the Charlton Historical Society!

From the binder, in short… back in Braintree, England, in 1560ish, William Skinner worked as a yeoman (either the owner of a small amount of land or a high ranking servant). A generation or so later, the Skinners traveled across the Atlantic to live in the new Connecticut Colony (one of the 13 founding ones). John Skinner is a FOUNDER of Hartford, CT. He is even buried in the Ancient Burying Ground in Hartford. And a relative from a subsequent generation has a headstone there that’s still legible.

The Skinners moved to Upstate New York in the mid-1700s and stayed until 1904 (at least Helen’s family line) when they moved to Manhattan.

Behold this:

This is a will or inventory from John Skinner dated 1690. If I were a handwriting analyst I might say he was a bit dramatic.

In Charlton, I toured an old one room school house and church that has been turned into a museum with many items from around the time Helen was growing up. Below are two of the transportation options.

The Old Scotch Church is where Helen was made to go on Sundays. The church there now isn’t the original, due to fires, but we can pretend it is. The church is where she pilfered candies in the summer with her cousin Betty back in and around 1910. There’s a vivid description of their time at the church by a relative here.

There’s a cemetery catty corner from it filled with family names. Helen’s parents, Frank and Gertrude are buried side by side. See below.

Above are the gravestones of Helen’s parents. Though they moved from upstate to Manhattan to Brooklyn to New Jersey, here they are together near where they met.

The Skinner house is no longer, and the Mead house (where summers were spent) couldn’t be found.

Many thanks once again to Erin at the Charlton Historical Society!

Now we jump ahead to when Helen takes a break from Posture Parades to country-hop around the Caribbean and Central America.

by Mary James

7. The Early Years, Phase II. (And a Moral: Always Look for Letters)

Helen didn’t have the final version of letters that she sent, but being such a detailed person (with foresight), she had drafted them first and kept the drafts (at least a few of them). And she had received some letters as well. There is one from her father, Frank Skinner, on wafer thin airmail paper, from 1940, about the family:

A ‘From Whence You Came’ Letter from Helen’s father, Frank Skinner, Sept, 6 1940

The evolution of Frank’s Skinner line, as he notes, ended with him. I like her father’s non-sequitur self-disparagement about Braintree and a lack of brains on the tree (though it is more a family-disparagement than a self one).

Frank and Gertrude Skinner, likely Arlington, New Jersey, 1940ish (around when the letter was written)

Halley’s Comet

The letter below doesn’t indicate to whom it was written or when, but based on the bit about Halley’s comet, it was after 1986, so she was at least 82. This is from Helen to someone who knew of Menands (where she was born, near Albany). To paraphrase:

Only once have I met anyone who knew where MENANDS NY is located.... My parents, Gertrude and Frank Skinner, took their daughter Helen to live in New York City when I was six months old.... One summer in the early thirties I drove through Menands on the way to somewhere else. So much for one’s old home town.

Side note: Somewhat strange that they moved from a super small town upstate New York to the great big Manhattan with a six month old baby. Perhaps for a job? Family? Regardless, when I picture the little family in NYC, I envision people dressed up in complicated looking long black attire with big hats, scurrying about super fast, like in those old choppy black and white videos.

I have never known where or how long we were in NY but next we moved to Brooklyn. The Skinners occupied the second floor of a house and mother’s brother Jack Bunyan, his wife Jessie and their new baby Betty had the lower floor. Two things I remember: There was a dumbwaiter which could be pulled up or down between the two kitchens and at some point Betty and I rode up and down on it (well supervised) to visit each other; 2) one night I recall mother taking me to the bathroom, closing the toilet lid and standing me up on it so I could look out the window (it was the only window on that side of the house) where the sky was bright as day -- a blazing light. She said to me ‘remember this: you’ve seen Halley’s Comet, and it won’t be back for 75 years.” I regret that while I was still around for the comet’s next appearance, it was performing in the Southern Hemisphere, and I missed it.

Side note: I’m not sure where the dumbwaiter duplex was other than it was in Brooklyn. Haley’s comet made appearances in April 1910 and April 1986. She would have been seven for the first one, 82 for the next. The next next one is in 2061, fwiw. And I love the imagery of the comet ‘performing’ in the Southern Hemisphere, like it was on tour.

The Bunyans and Skinners bought houses next to each other at XXX and XXX Stratford Rd. Our two backyards fenced around the outside made a wonderful playing space. The back of our lots faced on Coney Island Ave where streetcars went to that destination and in summer... Bathing suits were jumper like garments which came just below the knee, elbow length sleeves, black bloomers and black stockings and sneakers.

Side notes: Stratford Road is south of Prospect Park and is now the Flatbush/Kensington neighborhood of Brooklyn. Zillow told me the house remaining (one was an empty lot) was still the original house, so the same one that she (or Betty) lived in. 

I went to Kindergarten at PS 139 (rah rah rah the rose and the pine. Long live, long live 139).

Side note: This school exists and operates and is a few blocks north of the house on Stratford Road. Some sleuthing shows it was built in 1902. And I hope that is still their fight song.

The school looks like an old East Coast educational facility, and one that I imagine is purported to be haunted. It was built in 1902 and it looks old, so some of it must be original.

P.S. 139, Brooklyn, New York, 2021, at 11:20am ET

Draft Letter II – this letter was written by Helen in the late 1970s. The draft letter is five and a half handwritten pages and details family history from early 1800s – 1990s, but only a little is about her childhood and I’ll just include that (for now…). After a quick intro, she starts:

I never had the slightest interest in ancestors until most of the people died who might have helped to fill the family tree... However, if you prefer to have your ear bent, I’ll bring you up to date on the ones I know. In 1916-18 I went to St Paul Minn to stay with my mother’s half-sister Mary Mead Cavert, while I was in my first 2 years of high school. I then returned to Brooklyn to graduate from Erasmus Hall High in 1920.

Side note: This was not a short trip. It’s an 18 hour drive by today’s standards. Erasmus Hall High is still standing.

I don’t know where you dreamed up ‘at college in Missouri’ for I went to Columbia in NYC - I admit I wasn’t home very much, for I lived in a dorm, camp in the summer, I was a counsellor at varsity camps.

Side note: this is the only time she mentioned Columbia, and I still think it’s strange she didn’t brag more about it. She says the family moved to Arlington, New Jersey in 1920, which is when Helen started college and never went back home to live. I’m not sure if the cousin’s family moved with them so they could continue being neighbors.

The letter picks up again in the late 1930s and everyone will have to wait to hear about that.

Online Account – a remembrance of things past

Through Googling, I found a bit more nostalgia about young Helen. The material is from Chapter 6 of a book called The Mead Family, written by Jane Mitchell (the names Mead, Cavert, and Bunyan all appear — all on the mother’s side). Helen contributed to the book, and writes about her time with her cousin and bestie Betty:

Betty was known to her best friends as Lizzie Smellie Onion (her full name was Elizabeth Smeallie Bunyan). We were brought up almost as twins. We would shout between our houses (we didn’t have a phone) “What are you going to wear?’ by way of starting the day. She was in our house as much as in her own. We spent many summers at the Mead farm until I was sent off to St. Paul for 2 years in 1917.1

Smellie Onion is a very fun nickname (Betty is the girl scowling in the pictures in the last post, but that she allowed her best friends to call her smelly onion indicates she did indeed like fun). The pictures of the kids in the last post were taken at this Mead farm in West Charlton, New York. Betty comes up later in Helen’s story as well, and it seems they stayed very close (not geographically though).

I recommend that you to read the description of the Scotch church in the link above. It paints a picture of a colorful congregation in their Sunday best, crooning away to hymnals in a small old musty house of god, with Helen and Betty pilfering candies and trying not squirm. You can kind of picture it (and smell it).1

Now we will move onwards and upwards to the 1930s (literally upwards, as there are airplanes).

References

1 – http://charltonnyhs.org/2017_Mary%20Mead%20Cavert.pdf