Searching for information on women in the early settlement period of our area is a daunting task. There are few documented accounts of them. They were productive in childbearing and expanded the population in each successive generation in Blount County. The women kept the body and soul together of their families. If you go in search of information about them, you will find very little.
Their lives were difficult. For women in the 1700s and 1800s the number one cause of death was related to childbearing. Not the birth itself, but the unsanitary conditions that surrounded it that caused fatal infections.
For both males and females of the settlement years the number one cause of death was to be stillborn. Bearing a stillborn child was a sad intimate loss for the women.
The second leading cause of death during those times was food insecurity. Women were challenged to feed their families and themselves.
A friend tells me that there were a lot of early settlement women who died from burns. They toiled over fires to feed their families in awkward clothing that was meant for modesty, not practicality. Their clothing was ill suited to the hard work of raising and feeding a family, traveling miles on foot, gardening, nursing children, and cooking and foraging for food.
If you look at the genealogy records, many of the men had multiple wives, the first dying after producing several children. The next one was left with the care of the children and producing even more.
One of the most unsettling parts of researching their information is the lack of marked or documented indications that they even lived. Most have no known gravesite, no marking of their lives left for the next generations to honor. Their surnames and ancestries are sometimes lost to time.
The men’s lives were often documented through legal records. They are the ones who held the property deeds, the permits for construction, the names on the head of household census records and other information that allows us to piece together their lives. The women stood in silence, a shadow behind them, working as hard as their male counterparts to tame the frontier.
Many of these women were also as proficient as their male counterparts in the use of a long rifle. They had to be to survive the many dangers of the frontier. They were not the delicate women often portrayed in the movies but were tough and hardened from their difficult daily lives.
Though they were silent in documents, many left a living legacy that we see this time of year. Several weeks ago, Jerry Cunningham contacted my cousin Hilda Cummings Presley and me about the daffodils that were blooming on his farm. The bulbs were planted in the early to mid-1800s by an ancestor that Hilda and I share, Rachel Cummings. We do not know much about her, but her flowers thrive in the middle of Jerry’s field where a road fronting her home once traversed. Jerry graciously took us to see them and told us about the old road.
I have another friend, Georgianna Sharp Deane who calls the women in Cades Cove who planted buttercups there, “forgotten buttercup women.” She talks about her family legacy in Cades Cove and how she is sure that those bulbs were shared from one generation to the next and used to welcome newcomers to the homeplaces that they still mark.
Another friend, Knoxville author Patricia Hudson, told the story of legendary Daniel Boone through the eyes of the women who loved him. The book documents the lives of settler women. I encourage everyone who wants to hear the women’s stories from the era to read “Traces.”
I hope that you will seek out those forgotten women of your ancestry, tell their stories and document them in writing for the next generations.
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