Thanksgiving… I will be eating quesadillas and sea bass in Cabo San Lucas this year, along with all my descendants.  But this holiday will always raise memories of roast turkey and corn kernels stationed on empty plates by Aunt Carol, so that we could spend a few minutes remembering how the Wampanoag provided most of the food for those Europeans shivering on the Massachusetts shore in 1620-21. 

Every Thanksgiving I also think about Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book and the most influential female magazine editor up to that point in history.  Her campaign to spread the holiday that New Englanders already observed eventually convinced President Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a legal holiday.  It was a cause she promoted in the name of national unity, arguing that sitting down to eat a meal together always deepens bonds.  (She was thinking of mending the chasm between north and south.[1])

We always heard that SJH was a relative of some kind.  Clearly Lucy and Flora Clough were admirers of her advocacy of education for girls.  When Flora Clough died, she passed on a hard-bound copy of the 1866 issues of Godey’s, which GaGa passed on to me, mostly so I could choose some of the fashion plates to cut out and frame.  Every once in a while I revisit the recipes, patterns for embroidery, “hints for health” (keep your rooms at 60 degrees, like the French hospitals do), and romantic stories about handsome men attracted to spunky girls, although the book is now falling apart.

I have been a bit vague on just how we were related to SJH, so in her honor I took another look today.  The connection comes through the Buell family, who came north to Newport, New Hampshire from Killingworth, Connecticut around 1776 in the person of Deacon Daniel Buell (4)[2] and his wife Elizabeth Post.  Sarah Joseph Hale described our ancestors’ move to New Hampshire this way: “[They] they brought with them into the wilderness of the North that love of learning and those strict religious observances which distinguish the inhabitants of the Charter state.” She added that, in the absence of schools, she owed “my early predilection for literary pursuits to the teachings and example of my mother.”[3] 

One of Deacon Buell’s sons, Nathan Buell, married Thankful Griffin; they begat Gordon Buell, who begat SJH.[4]  Another of Deacon Buell’s sons, Daniel(5), husband of Ruth Towner, began Abraham Buell; he begat Florinda (Buell) Clough, who married Willard Clough of Grantham.  (Abraham and most of his other children went “west” to Crown Point, New York.) Florinda Buell and Willard Clough were the parents of my great great grandfather Charles S. Clough.

So, that makes Florinda and SJH second cousins, a fact the granddaughters of Florinda Clough were aware and proud of.  Flora Clough and Lucy (Clough) Lewin were both resourceful, independent women who advocated mightily for girls’ education – Flora pursued her dream of going to college and became dean of women at Fairmont College in Kansas. Lucy got her daughters through hours of musical training, elocution lessons and Shakespearean dialogue, as well as Smith College, supporting herself and her daughters by running a boardinghouse in Northampton.[5]  

Exploring the Buell family revealed another interesting connection.  Arthur and Marguerite (Lewin) Quimby were very, very distant cousins through the Buell line: both were descended from Samuel Buell, Deacon Daniel’s grandfather.  Samuel Buell was a “pioneer settler of Killingworth, Connecticut in 1664.”[6]

To end this circuitous genealogical story, here are some of the essentials of the Thanksgiving menu, as described in Northwood, or life North and South, the book about slavery that got Hale the job as Editress (her term) of Godey’s. (The book contains a whole chapter about Thanksgiving in New England.)  One should serve stuffed and basted roast turkey, leg of pork, loin of mutton, sirloin of beef, vegetables, gravy, a goose, ducklings, pickles, preserves, a chicken pie – and pumpkin pie, an “indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving.” Every place had a wine glass and two tumblers, with a slice of wheat bread on top of an inverted tumbler. For dessert they had plum pudding, custards, pie, cake, sweetmeats and fruits.[7]  No grains of maize in sight.

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[1] Although an abolitionist, SJH favored sending all former slaves back to Africa.

[2] Daniel Buell(4) was preceded by Samuel(3), Samuel (2), William (1), all of Killingworth, CT.

[3] Edmund Wheeler, The History of Newport, New Hampshire from 1766 to 1878, (Concord:1879) p. 126.

[4] Gordon Buell’s gravestone in Newport conveniently includes his genealogy.

[5] See The Clough Sisters, available on Amazon, for everything I know about Charles Clough’s daughters.

[6] The lineage is Arthur [Elwin Quimby, Wilbur Quimby, Benjamin Quimby, Persis Gee Quimby, Rhoda (Otis) Gee, Mary (Hinckley) Otis, Ebenezer Hinckley, Mary (Buell)l Hinckley, Samuel (2) Buell. 

[7] List from New England Historical Society, “Sarah Josepha Hale, the little lady from NH who started Thanksgiving.”  SJH is viewed ambiguously by the feminist community today, since she focused on women’s role in the home, as a well-educated teacher of her own children and bringer of music, culture and religion to the household.  SJH helped found Vassar College and wrote often about the need for more women doctors, and saw no reason women couldn’t serve as bankers.