What Happens to the Estranged

After her children died of influenza and her husband vanished, Anna Greenwood Nicholson lived alone in Atlantic City and was working as a domestic when the Great Depression hit. Anna's whole family had come to the U.S. from Vienna, and Boston was her only American hometown, but her married sister there had a full house and would soon have a granddaughter named Sylvia Plath. Anna's mother and brothers knew Anna had married a black American and they never forgave her. Anna left Atlantic City but cannot be found anywhere in the U.S. census of 1930. She was 45.

Two years later in Manhattan, registering as Anna Greenwood, Anna married Joseph Campbell, born in Lancashire, England of Irish parents. Anna Campbell filed with Social Security in 1938. That was the last U.S. trace of her until her mother's obituary (1945) called Anna "Ina Champee of London, England," and her brother's obituary (1957) called her "Mrs. Joseph Chappell, England."

This told me that 1) Anna's family knew she had remarried but was unsure of her name. 2) Anna was alive in 1957 and had moved to England. 3) For a while Anna shared an island with her great-niece Sylvia Plath. So Sylvia wasn't the first in her family to reverse-emigrate: It was the errant, whispered-about great-aunt she never met -- who couldn't be, could she, the "gypsy ancestress" who got around?

Hard-to-get British records (below) show Joseph and Anna in 1939 lived far from London, in the Lancashire shipbuilding town Barrow-in-Furness, population then about 75,000: the industrial north as Orwell described it in Wigan Pier. Anna was ninth in a household of nine, six of them Campbells. I hope she liked these relatives better. Joseph worked as a "boiler fireman, heavy." The town survived two 1941 bombardments, and Joseph died in Barrow-in-Furness in 1959 and Anna in 1964. Joseph has a gravestone. Anna doesn't.

British National Archives register, 1939, address 12 Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, E.B., Lancashire, England. Anna's identity is confirmed by her birth date, 28 March 1888*, and her husband's. Housewives were listed as "unpaid."

*Anna's baptismal record says she was born 28 March 1885, but much of her life she used the date 1888.

How to Research Family History

A while back I heard that Sylvia Plath's ancestry had been researched and written up but mostly cut from the final draft of Red Comet (2020), the very fine Plath biography. Another biography declined to discuss Plath's family and childhood to concentrate instead on Plath's "intensity." But where did she get that intensity?

Such questions led me to research Plath's family history (the "stock" or pedigree Sylvia found important when judging her boyfriends), finding patterns and plenty of drama:

Sylvia and Aurelia had African-American cousins. Aurelia's aunt's 1906 marriage to an African-American fits what is now a five-generation family pattern of marriages made to defy a parent or a family.

The first known photo of Otto Plath's parents, Theodor, and Ernestine, Sylvia's grandmother, who died in a mental hospital, I found on a genealogy website. Aurelia Plath, keeper and handler of Plath-Schober-Greenwood-Hughes dirty laundry, kept Ernestine's illness a secret so Sylvia could continue to idealize her dead father, a "pacifist" who to his wife and family was verbally abusive.

Sylvia had no Jewish ancestor. Sylvia had a German father, but she's also Polish, Austrian, and Hungarian. Plath's intelligence and no-nonsense work ethic came to her from both sides of the family. (She wrote: "I don't have time to be intelligent in a fluid, versatile way. I'm too nose-to-the-grindstone.")

For research I used most often two genealogy databases that anyone seeking their own family history can use:

On the free-of-charge database Familysearch.org view billions of pages of digitized info about a billion ancestors, each linked with documentation: census, immigration papers, birth/baptism, marriage, military, and death records, if any exist. That is its advantage over other genealogy sites. Site is run by the Mormon church (also called LDS). Free, but you must register on Familysearch.org as a user.

A good feature: Each ancestor on FamilySearch is assigned a short alphanumeric label so you can be sure, for example, that your ancestor "Anna Campbell" is the same "Anna Campbell" who is listed among 30 different Anna Campbells all born around the same time.

The site Ancestry.com is a gold mine of digitized records. Home subscriptions are costly, but my public library subscribes, and at the library I use it free. Libraries also subscribe to other helpful historical databases such as Newspapers.com. Ask your librarian.

You'll hit walls where there are no records or confusing records. I've learned that guesses are always wrong. These are human records of human beings, so sometimes inaccurate. My stepfather's gravestone says "1916" when he was born in 1919 because when he got his first job in the U.S. there was a mistake when he signed up for Social Security, and he wouldn't correct even the gravestone (ordered years in advance), fearing Social Security would find him out. 

My own record says I lived in Ferguson, MO, a place I never even went. I think it's where my landlord had his office. So trust but verify.

Four Generations of Rebel Weddings

I read somewhere that Sylvia Plath really stuck it to her mother by announcing, the day Aurelia got off the boat, that she and Ted Hughes (who was there) were getting married in three days: as if triumphantly quashing her mother's dream of a tame and crew-cut son-in-law. Didn't agree then, thinking Sylvia might have been too ecstatic to be mean, but I agree now because I found a pattern of defiant little weddings in her family. Four generations:

• Sylvia's "Grammy" and "Grampy," Aurelia Greenwood and Frank Schober, defying her father, got their marriage license July 3, 1905, the day the bride turned 18 and did not need parental permission. They wed as soon as legally possible: Monday, July 10 at Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
  
• Otto Plath in a Nevada courthouse really stuck it to his estranged and hated first wife with a quick-and-dirty divorce-mill divorce and by marrying Aurelia Schober on the spot the same day: January 4, 1932.
  
• Aurelia's daughter Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes told her mother, arrived in London for a visit on June 13, 1956, that they were marrying June 16. Aurelia puked up her dinner that night. She was the couple's only guest at St. George the Martyr church in London. (Glimpse its inside, in the church's promotional video.)
  
• Fast-forward to 1979, when Sylvia's daughter Frieda Hughes, "now 'engaged,' will be 19 on April 1," Aurelia Plath wrote a penpal, as if "engaged" was her granddaughter's teenage daydream, and maybe forgetting her own mother married at 18. But Frieda at 19 married a farmhand. It was a rebellious marriage and short. Ted moaned in a letter to a friend that his daughter was divorced at 23.

A Photo of Otto's First Wife and In-Laws

Here is a family photo of Otto Plath's first wife, Lydia Bartz, with her sisters and their mother Mathilde Kluck Bartz, taken near their home at Fall Creek, Wisconsin, on July 22, 1912. Soon afterward, Lydia left home for Washington State and married Otto Plath on August 7, 1912.

Besides the daughters in the photo, mother Mathilde (1855-1941; second from left) gave birth to four sons and a younger daughter, for a total of ten children. Three of the sons and the younger daughter died in infancy. The son who lived to adulthood, Rupert, introduced his sister Lydia to Otto Plath.

Pictured, left to right: Alma (b. 1887); proud mother Mathilde; Dora (b. 1885); Caroline (b. 1895); Lydia (b. 1889), and Odelia (b. 1892). A published, captioned photo shows Caroline and Odelia Bartz with a friend on the day of their high-school graduation; they were in the local high school's first graduating class.

Of all of Mathilde's girls only Lydia married, and at the time of this photo Lydia had worked for two years as a clerk in a general store; she wrote "clerk" on her marriage license. Lydia and Otto separated within a few years of marriage, but did not divorce until much later. None of the girls had children. Rupert (b. 1890) married and had two children.

When Mathilde Kluck married August Bartz (1839-1901), a U.S. Civil War veteran, he was a widower with seven living children. Lydia's half-sister Pauline Bartz Robinson, along with Rupert, witnessed Lydia and Otto's wedding in Spokane. August and Mathilde were both born in Posen, Prussia, the area Otto Plath and his family came from. The source of the above photo is an Ancestry.com gallery that stated the date the photo was taken and identified each woman. 

More about Lydia Bartz Plath's life and career.