#1--A LONG AND GOOD LIFE DOES NOT NEED PAPER PROOF, BUT IT SURE WOULD HELP!

Great-Great Grandmother Huldah Pierson

From her photo, Huldah seems like a private person, but a woman with quiet perseverance. For so long, I knew nothing about her birth and early years and nothing about how and where she died. So far I have found none of her vital records.

There was a family “story” that she had been disinherited by her father for some transgression.  For a long while I thought maybe the family was Quaker and that Huldah was disinherited from the church. Not true.

Huldah was born about 1836, daughter of Robert Pierson and Huldah Farnam in Leeds County, Canada West.  She was the middle of five siblings. What happened to her father, I do not know, but quite possibly he died around 1838-9. When her mother struggled to support her large family, Harry and Lucy Chipman, well-off farmers, offered to take three-year old Huldah and raise her alongside their children, Lewis and Julia Ann. Huldah went to a one-room school nearby. Huldah always believed that she had been officially adopted by the Chipmans, but this was not so.

Huldah did housework, helped prepare meals for the farmhands and as “Aunt” Lucy was pretty much an invalid, Huldah waited on her. Julia Ann was away teaching and there did not seem to be any other hired girls.

William Netterfield, an Irish immigrant, was one of the hired hands working the Chipman farm. They fell in love. But the Chipmans had another suitor in mind for Huldah and when told of her plan to marry William, they were angry, told her that she was not adopted and thus could expect no dowry from them. Huldah's daughter later wrote, "It must have been disappointing, but they were young, their love and a span of horses was all they had, and of course courage, and mother had learned much about home making but of course without the well provided pantry and cellar."

 Huldah, aged 17, and William, aged 21, married about 1853/4.  A few years later, before they left for Wingham, Huldah took her oldest daughter, to visit the Chipmans. Perhaps she hoped that “Uncle” Harry who had liked Huldah, would give a goose or hens or such; but there were no gifts. Despite this shunning, Huldah’s youngest daughter “felt sure that Mother had a wonderful life and good training with the Chipmans and I felt sure that her and Father’s life together—privations or not—was the richer for her early experience." 

Huldah and William

.”

In 1864, William and Huldah had 3 children when the extended Netterfield clan (about 17 of them) decided to move westerly across the province from Leeds County to Wingham, in Huron County where timberland had been thrown open by the Crown. The 300 mile journey across the unsettled colony must have been very arduous.

William bought land in Lower Wingham, cleared the land and built a red brick house. William was a “good farmer, proud of his land and tended it well.  He had a great love for trees, especially shade trees and had a fine row of maples, poplars and flowering trees between the fence and main road. From a rise near the house, one could see the bend of the Maitland River.” Here they raised their seven children. One twin daughter died from dysentery at one year old.

Of note: Later, the noted Canadian author, Alice Munro lived in the Netterfield house. She wrote an
unsettling short story, A Childhood Visitation, in which an elderly Mrs. Netterfield visited the house looking for her little baby.

Huldah’s daughter, Emma, wrote of her Mom’s socializing. “One summer day, Huldah walked to the store to exchange a basket of eggs for some print material to make dresses for her girls. She nodded to a stranger at the counter and introduced herself; she and Ann Currie became best friends. Huldah would regularly row the little home-made boat across the Maitland River, walk along a gravel road then cross a pasture to Ann’s large stone house for a kitchen visit.  Many hours, the two women chatted as they worked together quilting patchworks and “picking” wool to be carded. Much wool was spun to be knit into mittens, socks, hoods and shawls.” (Emma also described “the dog churn where Roger was harnessed for the churning of butter, a task he was not fond of and sometimes when he saw the churn he would sneak off and hide but the butter must be made and Roger must do his share”) It is touching to know that Huldah had found a good female friend to share stories and advice.

Farming in the late 1800s was a difficult physical life for both husband and wife but Huldah and William were used to hard work. Theirs was a fifty-year marriage when William passed in 1904.  For the next fourteen years, Huldah went [as she felt inclined] from the home of one of her children to another, admirable as she had to travel between Wingham, Saskatchewan, northern Ontario and North Dakota.

Her niece said Huldah was “the prettiest old lady she has even seen.”

Where, when, and how did Huldah die? For years, I searched for death or cemetery records in Canada or the US, but then finally happened on a smalltown North Dakota newspaper. In October 1918, Huldah arrived in Westhope to spend the winter with her daughter and in time  to attend the funeral of her grandson who had died of the Spanish flu. The disease hit North Dakota with great intensity in fall 1918. A few days later, Huldah also succumbed to the same illness.

 A funeral service was held in the Westhope Cemetery and Huldah was buried in an unmarked, unrecorded grave, (but most likely alongside her grandson). During the pandemic, victims were often hastily buried in unmarked graves; shipping a body across the Canadian border was not allowed. Her husband William is buried in Ontario in the Wingham cemetery.

Huldah’s obituary noted;” Three sons, two daughters, thirty-two grandchildren and twenty-seven great grandchildren…[survive her]. In early life this elect lady accepted Jesus as her Saviour and in a quick and unassuming way loved mercy, did justly, and walked humbly with her God.”

          

 HULDAH MOIRA PIERSON

b. May 14, 1836 likely in Bastard Township, in Leeds Co. Ontario                                               m. William Netterfield abt 1854 likely in Leeds Co.                                                                           d. Nov 2 1918 in Westhope, North Dakota                                                                                        my paternal great-great grandmother (Homuth-Netterfield line)