An Old Violin

 

Uncle Peg’s Chronicles

July 23, 2026

“An Old Violin”

 

“These were their settlements. And they kept good family records.”^[1]

 

Don’t forget to look for the title which is embedded in the chronicle.

 

 

 

FAMILY ALBUM

Thanks to Terry Bannister of Portage Vale, who restores headstones as a pastime. This is the stone of Sarah Ketchum, daughter of our ancestor, Captain Isaac and Mary (Ketchum) Ketchum. For our Peter Ketchum folks, Sarah is the sister of Peter Ketchum, for whom your ancestor was named. I’ll be going up to visit the Hill Grove and Portage Vale folks soon. Terry is also going to repair Peter Ketchum’s stone, which is in two pieces.

 

 

Photos I took at earlier times. Peter has been supporting his sister for many years.

And I Quote:

 

Excerpts from my letters to the editor. Thank you.

 

 I still marvel at how you keep going so strongly on these lines. – Jeanni

 

Fascinating! I can't imagine marrying someone 32 years one's senior. Times in Iowa must have been tough. Maybe since she was a single mother, she had no choice. William needed a cook and housekeeper. – Julia

 

Peg, that was a fascinating tale of Mabel! Thank you for sharing. I think you could work on a movie script about her next! - Susan

 

1926 to 1928

 

1924 to 1928 are the years that our Holmes ancestors spent renewing relationships that had somehow fallen by the wayside but with organization, letter writing, and challenging travel – by hook or by crook – they managed to come together again. They reacquainted and rediscovered their family ties. And then, one by one, they died, and many of those ties died with them.

2026 to 2028

 

I sent a copy of my James and Fanny Ballantyne manuscript out to several people, and based on their input, am reviewing it. Thanks to those of you who responded. Editors and readers help me to see what I couldn’t see for looking. After you read it many times, you don’t see the errors and the need for clarity very well. Of course, I had to get one date wrong, but only by a century.

 

Now, I am back to Uncle Billy and Aunt Maggie (Holmes) Snider. Surely, you remember them, as I have talked about them so often. What I am doing first of all is to weave several stories together. That is a dangerous thing to do: it’s so easy to cut and paste when I want to copy and paste before I cut. Mind you, the original scribblings are still there. I am having fun with this.

 

Before the summer is over, I will go and visit Billy and Maggie again. I try to do the rounds at least once a year: the cemeteries in Petitcodiac, Hill Grove, and Portage Vale.

 

I have visited the cemeteries where several of Daniel and Charlotte’s children are buried.

 

Maggie and Billy, I visit almost every summer in Hill Grove, and I go to the place where they lived and should have been buried. Louisa and Robert – I visited their cemetery, but not their grave site in Lincoln, Maine. I must not have known or remembered that they were there. Hattie and Abner rest beside her parents and sister in Petitcodiac. Some of us who attended the 2016 reunion visited James and Augusta in South China, Maine. William and Anna, like Robert and Louisa – sort of.  William’s ashes were scattered in his garden, which is now under a freeway. Anna is in Lincoln, and markers for both William and Anna are in the same cemetery as Louisa’s and some of Alf and Carrie’s children. Charles and Phoebe, of course, as they rest in Hill Grove. Bessie is with her parents and her sister, Hattie, in Petitcodiac. Depending on where little George was buried, I may have visited him unawares. The pioneer Blakeney Cemetery, down the road from Daniel and Charlotte, opened shortly before his death. Many of the stones are buried with their owners, after many years of neglect.

 

I do like a cemetery. Do you?

 

 

 

News from Holmes

Thanks to Aunt Eleanor (Holmes) Wilson for sharing this good news. Her niece, Kristy Eleanor Griffith, and her boyfriend, Jeff Robinson, got engaged on the 10^th. They have not set a wedding date yet. Kristy is the daughter of Gerard and Janet (Holmes) Griffith, and is in the Peter K Holmes line.

FAMILY HISTORY LESSON

Some of a family history is dry – like transcriptions of land records and probates. Otherwise, I try to make it interesting. There are many things that I do not, and cannot, know. Sometimes, within the confines of a history, I will insert an occasional wonder of my own. It’s rhetorical – creative writing, but I try to make it obvious.

This section contains my own story, my pondering, and factual information. I hope you can tell the difference.

“I first learned about Uncle Billy and Aunt Maggie when I discovered an old violin in a rustic case in a scary upstairs closet in the house in Hill Grove where they both died. I was about nine years of age. In my fuzzy memory, I see my young self lay the case on the feather bed, open it gingerly, and gaze upon the violin. I had already explored most nooks and crannies in the house; how had I missed this closet? I wrapped the violin in its ragged cloth and tucked it back where I found it, and pondered the instrument for the rest of that afternoon and evening. As we drove home in the big ol’ Chevrolet, I asked to sit in the front seat. With some trepidation, or perhaps anticipation, or both, I asked about the violin. Where, and who, did it come from? My childish whisper: could I learn to play it?                                                                               Although Mum remembered her grandfather describing Billy as a tinker, in the censuses his occupation was given as farmer. Probably he was both. Billy was creative, and made all manner of wooden crafts and furniture. I remember the old bottles in the desk at the farm with their fascinating little moveable wooden blocks in them. He made his own miniature threshing machine that he hooked up to his dogs. Mum said that the dogs ran up a ramp, back down and around, like a treadle, and thrashed the grain. We know that he was a musician; my mother inherited his melodeon and I, his violin. Mum said that he played the fiddle at the Saturday evening barn dances, and the melodeon at church services on Sunday. According to family lore, he made his violin, and Mum insisted that this was true. It is the violin that I did learn to play in my childhood. It sat in the closet since 1916, in the chamber next to the stovepipe.                            The violin went through a rough period after Billy died in 1916. Wood needs humidity, but all it received was dry wood smoke from the chimney behind the closet in the upper chamber, causing it to come unglued and crack. Dad and Mum had it repaired and maintained since I began taking lessons, even in later years when it wasn’t being played. I’ve been told that musical instruments need to be played, as if they were animate. I regret not playing it after I grew up, and now I have lost my touch.”

 

I hope you are enjoying your summer.

Uncle Peg

 

This ends week thirty of our centennial virtual celebration of 1926