Searching for Susan

"You will be sure to come Tuesday, won't you?"

That was Susan Smith's question to Edwin Fletcher; the last line, on the last of a hundred letters between this engaging couple. How could I not wonder if Edwin did come to Danvers, Massachusetts, on Tuesday, January 22, 1867 and marry Susan Smith the following day?

I was determined to peek into the future of this couple I'd grown to know so well through their fascinating correspondence. But where would I begin? An interested friend offered to help. She would transcribe the more than fifty thousand words contained in the letters, the old fashioned way, by typewriter. My sister, who lived in California, was equally enthralled with the century-old correspondence. Once transcribed, a copy was sent to her and she agreed to index the various people mentioned in the correspondence, in an attempt to determine relationships. My wife and I would delve into public records.

It was 1970 when we began this investigation. Far fewer sources of information were readily available back then. We lived in another state, a hundred miles away from Acton and Lynn, Mass. Furthermore, we knew nothing of genealogical research. My wife, a quick learner, studied up and we slowly began our search.

My first success occurred on a trip to Acton, where I located the graves of Edwin and Susan Fletcher. Yes, they married and had years together before Susan passed away, on January 21, 1902, two days before their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Edwin, listed on the reverse side of the same grave marker, lived four and a half years longer, until August 8, 1906.

I remembered how Edwin's brother James Fletcher expressed concern in an early letter, about Susan's fragile health. He recommended Edwin "let her go." His fears were unfounded. She lived to age sixty four, Edwin to nearly seventy-seven.

Discovering the graves was just the beginning of our search. Over the next few months, and years, both my wife and I learned to dig into federal census records, state archives and town clerk's ledgers. It was a far slower process than we would achieve with today's Internet, but we kept at it. Our search became a major project, and later included visits to Salt Lake City and the Mormon's extensive genealogical archives.

Would anyone care? After all, the letters had found their way into a dusty stamp store, with only the envelope-packaging considered of value. No one was interested in the contents of those envelopes. The letters were more than a hundred years old when we began our search. Even the generation after Edwin and Susan, if children had been born of their marriage, would be deceased by the time we began our search. Still, we continued to dig further, because we cared.

Court records and census reports brought the first detailed results. Edwin and Susan were married, as their graves had indicated. Rev. James Fletcher, Edwin's often mentioned, performed the ceremony at The First Church, in Danvers, Mass. Two years later, on June 5, 1869 Evelyn Sherwood Fletcher was born in Acton, Mass.

The family settled in Acton, with Edwin continuing in the family shoe business until John Fletcher, Sr., Edwin's father, passed away in 1879. The business, Fletcher and Sons, begun over sixty years earlier, ceased operation. Edwin and his family moved to Lawrence, Mass. By the time of 1880 Federal Census Edwin was listed as a grocer, and later, in 1900, as working in insurance. Susan was a homemaker, her teaching career apparently never resurrected.

We followed the lives of the others who often appeared in the letters. Edwin's father, a past church deacon and participant in the war of 1812, lived to age eighty-nine. He was an early anti-slavery advocate, strong temperance leader, and was very active in pubic for his life-long residence town of Acton. His wife Clarissa a, grandmother to baby Evelyn, died in 1875 at age seventy-six.

All of the Fletcher family, whose ancestors first arrived in 1630, were actively involved throughout their lives. Both of Edwin's grandfathers fought in Concord at the start of the Revolution. Succeeding generations of Fletchers continued serving their nation and community.

Edwin's brother James continued as a respected figure in both education and religion. He pastored various churches as an ordained minister and was involved in schools, both as a teacher and administrator. He returned to Acton in his later years where he served on the school board and wrote a short history of the town.

The other Fletchers, brothers John and Quincy and sister Abbie all lived to see the turn of the century after raising children to adulthood.

We never learned much about Susan Smith Fletcher's ailing father. A man of the same name was listed in the 1870 census of Ipswich, Mass. as an inmate in an asylum for the insane.

Susan's brother Charles and his family continued to live on Water Street, in Danvers, in the house Susan loved so much. Charles too lived beyond the turn of the century.

Young Charlie, Susan's nephew who often posted letters to Edwin for his Aunt, married, had a family, and lived into the 1920s.

Mary, Susan's beloved sister-in-law, continued to reside in the same Danvers home, apparently for the rest of her life. She was living there at the time of the 1910 census, at age eighty-seven. Her daughter Julie resided with her, and perhaps a cat or two. Young Julie, who turned eleven at the time of the letters, never married.

We know Edwin kept a diary, but unfortunately it is lost. It was ironic that after numerous trips to Blacks Studio in Boston and the tintype frenzy of the era, no known pictures of Edwin or Susan exist. We can only wonder what this couple looked like as they posed stone-faced before the camera. Our only hint may be a remark that Edwin bore a close resemblance to his brother, Rev. James Fletcher. As James was an important figure of the time, there's a chance some historical society might have a picture of him. As for Susan, I'm not sure I'd want to see her image. She can't have been as beautiful as I picture her in my mind.

It's ironic too, that the letters ceased in the year 1867. Perhaps that was the beginning of the end of the preponderance of beautiful, hand written letters as a form of correspondence. Eighteen Sixty-seven was the year the typewriter was invented. The telephone followed less than ten years later.

Our search went on as questions remained unanswered. How did the letters find their way to a Boston stamp store? Were there any living descendants of Edwin and Susan Fletcher? But before I relate our findings, I have a sad story to relate.

Several moves and a decade or more after our 1970s search for Susan began, we decided the Internet of the 1990s offered a resource to renew our quest. When I sought to retrieve my extensive file, I came up empty! Everything had been packed together in a single file box; the original letters, my transcribed copy of them, and all my research papers and correspondence. It was all missing! We searched everywhere. I even contacted the purchaser of the last house where we'd lived. All was for naught. I never found my work. I could only assume the file box was lost, misplaced, or inadvertently discarded during one of our moves. I was devastated. Nothing remained of Susan and Edwin's legacy.

The woman who had voluntarily transcribed the letters was now long deceased. Then I remembered I'd sent my sister in California a copy. It was while staying with her as she lingered in the last stages of lung cancer in 2002 that I finally retrieved the old typed set of Susan and Edwin's letters. While my research papers were lost, along with the originals, at least I now possessed copies of the letters themselves.

Thirty years before, we were anxious to learn if there were any living descendants of the letter writers. Finally, after many months of research, we learned Edwin and Susan's only child; Evelyn Fletcher had married, at the age of thirty, in 1900. She and her husband had at one time lived in Newton, Massachusetts. Sons were born in 1901 and 1909, a daughter in 1905.

We were unable to find any record of the family beyond the 1930 census. Finally, a break came when we learned Evelyn Fletcher had passed away twenty years earlier, in 1953. I made a special trip to the Middlesex Massachusetts Court House and was able to read the will of Edwin and Susan's child and view the probate papers. The documents listed the three children, but with addresses by then twenty-year-old.

I wrote to all three, explaining what I'd discovered, and asked if they had any interest in my findings. Letters to the oldest son and daughter were returned as undeliverable. While the letter to the youngest son, who at that time would have been in his sixties, wasn't returned, nor was it answered. Many months passed and I had given up hope. Then I received a short note, from Edwin and Susan's grandson, now living in Connecticut.

The gentleman was a retired dentist. His older brother had passed away in 1963 but his sister Miriam, now living on Cape Cod, was very interested in the correspondence I'd discovered.

I wrote to her. She answered by return mail. At her request, I sent her a copy of the transcribed letters. Neither she, nor anyone in her family, had any idea the letters existed, much less how they ended up in the marked-down bin of a Boston stamp store, a hundred years after they were written.

Miriam knew no details of the lives of her grandparents Edwin and Susan. Both were deceased before she was four months old. The same held true of nearly everyone else mentioned in the letters. There was but one exception. Miriam remembered, as a young child, visiting elderly Aunt Julia Smith, a kindly old lady who lived in Danvers and owned a cat.

There was one other connection Miriam, who died in 1976, could make. A painting she'd always admired had passed down to her years earlier. Even then, it was hanging on her Cape Cod wall. The old oil pictured pansies, painted by Susan, her gift from Edwin Fletcher, so very long ago.

The end.