Will Our Hacketts Please Stand Up

During the last half of the 1800s there came and went through Taunton, MA, a whole slew (technical term) of Hacketts.  The trick was not to find them - the abundance of city directories listed them from year to year.

Who, however, were those most directly related to TRAEA's Grandma?  The choices were:

• Benjamin the painter
• Edward the upholsterer
• Francis F. the junkman turned harnessman
• George E. the laborer
• Henry F. the moulder
• Myron H. the carpenter
• Nancy the widow 
• (No first name) the laborer
• Philander the laborer
• William the furnaceman turned moulder
• William the upholsterer
• William the hairdresser
• William the moulder (another one)
• William H. the farmer
• William H. the stone mason and
• William M. the laborer

Whew!  I really wanted to see everyone pretty much at the same time.  Sure.  Being a pencil-and-paper sort of researcher, I folded a blank standard sheet of along the longer side to create "strips."  I ended up needing multiple sheets, so an 11"x17" sheet of paper would have been better.  But that's hindsight.  A spreadsheet might also work for those who prefer computer analysis.

I wrote the name of one Hackett at the top of each strip, followed by the first year I found that person in a directory, their profession that year and their address.  Through the decades, those addresses and occupations changed - or people appeared and "removed" from the scene.  If information remained the same, I wrote just the directory year.  As information changed it was added to the growing information base.

Truth be told, I had pretty much known at the start that the most direct ancestors were William the furnaceman turned moulder and Francis F. the harness maker turned junkman.  And, since the number of Hacketts was mushrooming by the end of the century, this search spanned only about 50 years.

But the exercise served several purposes.  First by combining this with census data I felt more certain that a great uncle hadn't become lost somewhere.  Then it opened my eyes to a whole crop of possible relations (what's with all the Williams???).  And finally it provided some guidance when TRAEA's Grandpa and I visited Taunton.  It's unlikely that we saw all the same houses where these Hackett ancestors lived. But there was a sense of place - literally standing in the middle of the street and knowing it was the same neighborhood where some of my Hackett ancestors lived.  Way cool!

Look Both Ways at the Tracks

All Mary Betterly Carpenter French wanted to do was cross the railroad tracks.  Instead, she became a legal notable.

It was the early 1870s and 67-year old Mary and her preteen grandson, Everett C. Pierce, were traveling by carriage, approaching tracks of the Taunton (MA) Branch Railroad that passed near their Bristol County home in Berkley.  (There's not too much creative license here - Berkley is, shall we say, compact.)  Since they had seen a train just moments before, they proceeded across the tracks without stopping first.

However, unbeknownst to them, one car of the train had been decoupled so that it could make a running switch farther down the line.  As these Hackett relations crossed the tracks, that single rail car hit them, causing significant injuries.

Mary described, "The next I knew I was lying in the road, with blood on my face, and severe pain in my head.  I was holding the reins."

Everett said, "I found myself on the (railroad) car, a flat car loaded with scrap-iron; the car stopped; I saw my grandmother on the end of he car. . . . . "

While admitting that neither she nor Everett had looked before crossing the tracks, Mary nonetheless sued the railroad for personal injuries and for injury to her 10-year-old horse.  Amazingly, she won, although TRAEA's Grandma has not yet found out the exact settlement.  Winning was particularly noteworthy because similar suits against what were then the all-powerful railroads were routinely dismissed if it could be shown that the plaintiff bore the slightest degree of fault.

As a landmark case, Mary's suit has since been cited more than 70 times.

Not nearly as interesting as the case itself, but worth noting are the gyration's that TRAEA's Grandma went through to get the story.

• Googled Mary's complete name, rather than any shortened version.  This generated a tantalizing synopsis in the 1884 publication by Houghton, Mifflin and Company and The Riverside Press, Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts / March-September 1874.  
• Visited the Bristol Superior Court in Taunton, MA, because it wasn't clear to this non-legal mind whether Mary or the railroad prevailed.  The lady there was delightfully nice, kept assuring me that the case has been cited "more than 70 times," copied the Westlaw version of the case and never answered my question directly.
• Called our family attorney to ask for a definitive answer.

He was astonished that Mary won.  He explained that during this time period if a plaintiff contributed in any way to their injuries they probably lost based on "contributory negligence."  Between the time Mary prevailed over the Taunton Branch Railroad and today, however, many states have instituted "comparative negligence" or "comparative fault" as a judicial standard so that a plaintiff who was perhaps a bit at fault may still receive compensation.

Did Mary play a part in that change?  This grandma would like to think so.

Tree links:
Mary Betterly / Bitterly Carpenter French, the widow of Ephraim French, may have been a child of Andrew and Mary Betteley
Everett C. Pierce was a grandson of Ephraim French

And Here We Are

Genealogy in the Hills/Hackett tree grew from an occasional interest to what my family has come to see as an addiction.  Not that I'm an expert, by any means.  But genealogy is a source of enormous pleasure.

Early in this journey, my mom, a Hackett, gently waved a gauntlet by saying, " You won't find anything about your father - he was an only child.  And nobody in my family knows anything." (The emphases were hers.)  More than a decade after her death, countless tidbits of information, a collection of stories and dozens of family names are stashed away in binders, files, books and stray pieces of paper.  She would be astonished and, despite her general aversion to history, fascinated.

This blog is not an attempt to catalogue everyone on the tree.  Besides - some of what I think I know is probably wrong.  Pardon me, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for adapting your quote, but every genealogist understands there are ancestors we know we know, there are ancestors we know we don't know and there are ancestors we don't know that we don't know.

I'll be sharing notes about the people I know that I know, hoping to hear from others about people I know that I don't know and learning about people I never suspected are attached to the Hills/Hackett Tree.  And so, here we are!

Tree links:  7th great granddaughter of Joseph Hills, 2nd great granddaughter of William Hackett