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 by freight ship around Central America, but then two things happened. One fun Google thing, and the other a weekend away sprinkled with ancestral kismet.
Posture Parades
1) whilst Googling schools where Helen taught, I found a fun 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! All of it sounds wonderful, but she saved the best for last. So debutante-ball-ish, no? Proper young ladies with good form parading just so?
And I was kinda right as Google tells me a Posture Parade is a group of women marching in formation. So like soldiers, but when all females, it’s a parade of pert young women with proper posture, probably wearing little white gloves and waving a flag around. But while Helen liked order, a debutante she was not (100% by choice). And this parading fell under her physical education program, so I bet it was no cat walk. Work it!
The below looks like she is dressed for one of those moonlight horseback rides, no?
A Field Trip, a Binder Full of Family, ChatGTP, & the 13 Colonies
And then, 2) the field trip, which led to the other things in the header.
About a month ago I was at home working on this, and the husband popped in to announce that we were going for a weekend getaway, place TBD, in mid-February. A surprise mini trip! As these things go, since I truly enjoy planning, it could be a surprise mini trip that I orchestrate if I wanted. And I did. The husband seems to be genuinely intrigued with this project of mine, so I thought why not travel to the Upstate New York places Helen spent time? There’s Menands, Charlton, West Charlton, Saratoga Springs… all pretty close together and near Albany.
We’ve vowed never to rent a car again from inside any of the five boroughs, but luckily Beacon, on Metro North, is safely outside urban sprawl, and has car rentals. And it’s cute and has great restaurants. So perfect home base for an exploratory weekend. Train tickets, Airbnb, car… quickly booked.
When I started the blog over the holidays, I’d reached out to some libraries and historical societies and such in the towns mentioned, so had a bit of a head start. Charlton and West Charlton, where Helen spent summers, have an historical society and I messaged them on Facebook. They wrote back, saying they would look into the names I mentioned. And then I also sent along some pictures and letters and such with dates and places and names.
I wrote them again about a month later when I was planning the trip, asking if I could say hi. Unbeknownst to me, the woman who had written me back from the society, Erin Miller, 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 friggin’ 1500s. And also she found that the Skinners were settlers in the first 13 colonies (what??).
She researched, typed, scanned, organized, printed, and presented it to us in a binder when we met her for lunch, in Charlton’s one restaurant, aptly named The Charlton Tavern. The binder, which even has a personalized cover, is here next to me a week later and I’m a little afraid of it. More like in awe. That someone would take the time and effort to put it all together. She said she had a lot of fun and loves researching families, so I am trying not to feel guilt. But thank you, Erin!
The binder breaks downs the whos, whens, wheres, and works (ie occupations, but alliterative 😉 ) for the main names in the family — Skinner, Smeallie, Mead, Bunyan, and Donnan (Donnan is new to me and I’ll be investigating). And has photocopies of census records, wills, cemetery plots, inventories, property records, bibles, birth records, death records, etc. Gah!! And it also has some modern correspondence with distant cousins a few times removed.
My original plan was to stick to Helen’s story for the blog and swing back to family connections and other paths later, but this was too good.
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 — those are pretty different things). A generation or so later, the Skinners traveled across the Atlantic to live in a newly forming colony, specifically to the Connecticut Colony (one of the 13 founding ones, and the Skinners got there right around when it was established in 1633). 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. That’s gonna be my next field trip.
The Skinners moved to Upstate New York in the mid-1700s and stayed until 1904 (at least my family line) when they moved to Brooklyn. Other cool stuff: we have Deacons in our family. Who knew? There is a Sergeant Ebenezer Skinner Sr in the late 1600s. He lived in the Mass Bay Colony. I like the name Ebenezer.
Behold this:
We quickly went through all this over lunch, me trying to not drip artichoke dip on the artifacts. After we ate, we crossed the street and 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.
An aside: there’s no mention of how Helen’s family got around back then, but they traveled many times between Brooklyn and Charlton in the early 1900s. It took us two hours to get from Grand Central Station to Beacon and then once we had the car, another two hours to get to Charlton. I imagine they took a train. But then how did they get around when they were there? They stayed on a farm — maybe a horse and buggy, ridden by a family member came to pick them up? And they planned it all by letter?
I have just used ChatGTP to answer these questions. It says there were many trains then, with both Albany and of course NYC as destinations on the New York Central Railroad. And then when they got to Albany, there was a train line from there to Schenectady that stopped in West Charlton. It would all take 3-4 hours from Brooklyn, with trains traveling at 40-50 miles per hour. It would have cost $2.00 (or $50 today). Questions answered! That was some real time stuff right there.
Below are two of the transportation options, and a picture of Erin outside the town museum. Erin is now an honorary member of the family (if she wants to be, that is 😉 ).
After the school and museum, Erin sent us on our way to West Charlton, where more history lived.
The Old Scotch Church is where Helen was made to go on Sundays. The church 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 absolutely filled with family names, including Skinner. Helen’s parents, Frank and Gertrude are buried side by side. See below.
My family is scattered and small and rarely, if ever, formally buried these days, and this was the first time I’d ever seen a gravestone with any family name. My great grandparents, Francis and Gertrude had lived in Arlington, New Jersey until Frank passed away. Gertrude moved in with her daughter Mary (Helen’s sister, and my grandmother) in New Jersey in 1942 and lived with them until she passed away. But here they are reunited in West Charlton.
The Skinner house was no longer, and the Mead house (where summers were spent) we couldn’t find, though we did creepily drive down the road it was purportedly on, stopping and starting frequently, staring down long driveways. I suspect if the house is still there, it’s been altered.
Then we drove back to Beacon as the sun set, the binder with us, prime for perusal.
Our mini trip was exceptionally successful, far beyond what I hoped even. Many thanks once again to Erin at the Charlton Historical Society!
And now it is safe to close this chapter and visit Helen as she takes a break from Posture Parades and Upstate summers to country-hop around the Caribbean and Central America.