Noble Scots

To quote the immortal Bette Davis, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” It turns out some of my grandmother’s forebears didn’t merely react to history.

They made it.

Her first recorded family members are no more than vague shapes in a thick Scottish mist. During the Dark Ages, they were petty kings and lairds holding sway over portions of a divided land we wouldn’t recognize today. They were baptized by their relation St. Columba, “The Apostle to the Picts” and in a great hall’s flickering firelight listened to tales of Queen Medb, Niall of the Nine Hostages, and the warrior Pendragon .

Early in the 13^th century, a personality emerges. Sir David Graham of Dundaff was born in his father’s Ayrshire castle in 1210. He served as the sheriff of Berwickshire, obtained a charter for vast tracts of land from King Alexander III and acquired the property of Kincardine in Perthshire.

His heirs were similarly involved in their country’s politics. His son Sir John de Graham was killed in 1298, fighting alongside his close friend William Wallace in the Battle of Falkirk.

Sir John de Graham. Source: clan-graham-society.org 

Another son, Sir Patrick Graham of Kincardine, was more diplomatic. Back in 1281 he had been sent to negotiate the marriage of Prince Alexander of Scotland and Margaret of Flanders. He acknowledged Margaret, Maid of Norway, as heiress to the Scottish throne. In 1292 he swore fealty to England’s Edward I and agreed to the betrothal of the Maid to Edward’s heir, the future Edward II.

This situation seems very genteel, but it wasn’t. Seven-year-old Margaret died of “seasickness” on her bridal voyage and was buried at sea. The only certainty about the child’s fate was her being tossed overboard.

Sir Patrick was summoned to attend Edward I into France in 1294, and while engaged in this “honor”, became disenchanted with the English.

In 1296, he died in the Battle of Dunbar, defending King John Balliol against English invaders. He was considered one of the noblest and wisest of the Scottish barons, and even impressed Edward’s soldiers with his bravery and gallantry. 

Battle of Dunbar. Source: Pinterest

A Marriage Made in Two Weeks?

Time, work, and constant worry had worn down the widowed Annie Beers and confined her to a wheel chair. Her children decided they needed a practical nurse to care for her, so they hired 17-year-old Frances Woodley, fresh from the Woodstock, Vermont countryside.

Frances Woodley at 17

I think of this as the Hire from Hell. Two people who never should have met collided, sparked, and married two weeks later were Earl Beers and Frances Woodley.

Up to now, I’ve felt competent in researching and explaining what I could about our ancestors’ lives. They proved to be precisely what I expected: humble working folks from alpine Europe and depressed crannies of the British Isles, dealing with History’s outrageous slings and arrows as best they could.

There was nothing about Frances Edith Woodley to indicate her background was any different. She often spoke of disliking her dowdy, “ugly” name and saw no reason to discuss her prosaic “Pennsylvania Dutch” antecedents. She wasn’t trying to mislead me or anyone else; she simply didn’t know.

A Horse Thief and a Flapper

The aforementioned Earl Beers was my legal grandfather and also loved to assert (often within earshot of his exasperated older sister Lena) that his father George had been hanged as a horse thief. This is one story I always doubted: Pasadena/lynching/1905 seemed unlikely. So I Googled “George Beers horse thief” and found nothing to make me (or my great-aunt Lena) faint in horror.

I hereby maintain and attest that George Washington Beers died on 2 February 1905 in Pasadena, with nary a rope in sight. I suspect his cause of death was pneumonia.

George Washington Beer's family was used to subsisting on slender means, but surely his death caused them great duress. There was no one to help them because by this time their feisty Uncle Patrick had been issued a one-way ticket to Smithereens. The older children must have earned money any way they could; there were few child labor laws in the early 1900’s.

In 1910 Annie was the head of her own household, living with her young sons Lu Verne, Earl, and Glenn. In 1918 she resided at 1810 North Summit Avenue, Pasadena, CA with Earl and Glenn, who were classified as “gardeners”; son Verne had married Ruby Riggs and now lived several blocks away on Summit. He called himself a “rancher”. The 1920 census shows the widow Annie living with 18-year-old Glenn and his 16-year-old bride Olive. Now Glenn was termed “head of household.”

Current home at 1810 North Summit Ave., Pasadena. Source: Google

By young manhood Earl Beers had accrued enough money to buy himself a motorcycle. He zipped around Pasadena in his spare time, and one day he spied a very young, chubby girl with a “rich old father” riding behind a suitor on another motorcycle. For the rest of his life, he claimed the girl was a wild, loose “flapper” for doing such a thing.

That girl who lived across town was my grandmother Alma Hansen on my father's side, and Earl was chagrinned when my only reaction to his tale was laughter and “Good for her!”