Foreword I start to practice my trade at the point where the satisfactions of the official story break down. 1 —Hilary Mantel
In 2014 Joyce M. Bowden, my wife, published a 354-page genealogical book entitled Four Connor Generations in South Carolina 1790–1920, demonstrating her prowess as a scrupulous and relentless researcher. During that research, she became acquainted with several key figures in this book, Founding Mothers: Greenwood Methodist Church, Greenwood, South Carolina, 1858 , and wanted to tell their story. Then, Joyce died unexpectedly on June 12, 2022 at a vigorous and energetic age 83. This is her unvarnished draft, a work interrupted, which I have presented here so that others might benefit from Joyce’s efforts. As she researched and wrote, Joyce felt handcuffed. One cuff was the limitation of strict genealogical research. Its product is often “X and Y begat W,” repeated over and over. Other than statistical and chronological data, Joyce discovered an almost complete absence of mid-19th century, publicly available material about the eight founders of the Greenwood Methodist Church to supplement the information she had about their ancestry. Social norms of the day explain the dearth of information Joyce faced, since convention held that a woman’s name should appear in a newspaper only at three times: her birth, her marriage, and her death. Otherwise, she was to be invisible, with no recognized role in public life beyond motherhood and its spin- offs: the nurturing and care-giving roles of homemaker, teacher, and nurse. Joyce’s research discovered no diaries, no letters, no notebooks, no local newspaper stories about the creation of the church. She discovered not one photo or portrait of any of the eight women! The unfortunate result is that the women in the draft are stick figures—no flesh, no blood, no hopes, no aspirations, no longings. The second cuff was that these women were dealing with a large Christian church in which white men occupied all positions of power and authority. If women were invisible in the American public arena
1 “Enriching the Record,” “Appreciation: Hilary Mantel, 1952–2022” by Boyd Tonkin, The Wall Street Journal, Review, October 1-2, 2022, p. C10.
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