Have I Learned the Family Secret, Nellie?

My maternal grandmother was Nellie K. Hussey . . . well, that’s partially correct.  Her tombstone reads: “Nellie K. Hussey; July 25, 1878 – April 2, 1959.”  As far as I knew while she was alive and while my mother’s generation was alive, her name was Nellie.  One time I asked my mother if Nellie was short for some other name.  Her answer was that Nellie was Nellie.  But after further grilling from me, she finally admitted that Nellie was not her given name but it’s the name on the death certificate and every legal document she ever signed, including her marriage license.  I always planned to explore this matter further but, by the time I got around to any serious study of family history, there was no one to ask. 

Several years ago, a friend’s wife, who does genealogical research professionally, volunteered to look into my family’s history.  She did far more work than I ever expected and I learned some very interesting things about my family.  One of the revelations was that Nellie’s given name was Margaret Ellen Kearney.  I love this name.  I think it is beautiful.  So, while one mystery was solved, another raised its head: why would she insist from the time she was a young girl that she be called Nellie?  There is just not a single clue in all the remaining family documents.  So while this is an interesting subject to me, there did not seem to be any answer this side of heaven.

Over the past few months I have been becoming acquainted with Father Abram J. Ryan, the Poet Priest of the South and the person for who my high school was named.  I am working my way through his collected poems while reading David O’Connell’s well researched biography.  The poems are incredible but not modern.  They are much more like Kipling’s in that most them rhythm in the classical sense and they tell a story.  I’m only a third of the way through the poems and my heart has been deeply touched – I’ve shed many a tear.  While reading the biography I came to the section when he first agreed to publishing a book containing his poems (he claims they are not good enough to merit the term poems and refers to them as “my simple verses.”)  While the majority of his poems have religious themes, the ones for which he is the most famous are the ones that lament the “Lost Cause.”  Ryan was born in Illinois and raised in St. Louis but his sympathies were with the South, not in defense of slavery but in defense of state’s rights. His poems were so popular in the south that many poems were required memorization for school children up until the late 1920’s.  When Ryan published his first edition of his collected poems in 1879, he felt that something was needed to “soften” the collected works so that the readers would not think that he was antagonistic against the North because many of his poems defended the Lost Cause.  A friend of his had won a poetry contest conducted by a Mobile newspaper and he asked her if he could include her poem “Reunited” in his collection.  She agreed and it has been part of his collection in every edition since.

My grandmother, Nellie, was surely exposed to Ryan’s poems as she progressed through school.  She finished high school and very soon began to teach in a one-room school house (grades 1 through 8) in Palmyra, Tennessee.  The friend of Ryan’s who wrote “Reunited” was named Margaret Ellen Henry Ruffin, but he knew her by her preferred name: Nellie Henry. 

I was only 9 years old when my grandmother had to be put in a nursing home because of the dementia she was suffering.  But I do remember how much she liked to read and how much she loved poetry.  Did she choose to be called Nellie because of her knowledge of Nellie Henry?  The final answer will have to wait but I certainly think it is possible and interesting.