Still lives with Mrs. J. B. Nichols

The 1893 county atlas photographed five people out of one family and printed them on a single leaf.

Four of them are named the way this county's books name people. Samuel A. Bartlett. John C. Bartlett. John B. Nichols. Mrs. Adaline M. Nichols.

The fifth reads Miss Ann M. Bartlett.

It is the only caption in that volume with no man in it.

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That is a smaller claim than it sounds, and it is worth being exact about, because the book is not silent about women.

Four women have portraits in it. Sarah R. Davis is named under hers. Louisa M. Wildman is named under hers. Adaline M. Nichols is named under hers. The fourth is captioned Samuel Burnell and Wife. and her portrait is the same size as his.

Then the book indexes its own pictures, and two of the three who had their names lose them.

Bartlett, Ann M

Nichols, Adaline M

Burnell, Samuel and wife

Davis, H. and Wife, and Buildings

Wildman, L. L., and wife

The ones who vanish are the ones whose entry had to carry a building as well. The index is economising, and the economy falls on the wife every time.

Ann M. Bartlett is on that list once, by herself, with nothing else to carry.

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The plate gives her the same room it gives her brother.

Measured on the scan rather than by eye, the four corner panels are one size. Samuel's is 780 pixels by 976. Hers is 768 by 980. That is a difference of about one per cent in area, and the smallest of the four is not hers.

Somebody laid out that sheet and gave the unmarried sister a panel the size of the county treasurer's.

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Here is everything the record holds about her.

She was the eldest of eight, or at least she is listed first of eight, twice, in two different books eleven years apart.

She came to this county before her father did, with two of her brothers.

And in 1893 she was living in her sister's house.

Annie M., who still lives with Mrs. J. B. Nichols.

That is the whole of it. No birth. No death. No marriage. No year of arrival. Not one date of her own, in any of the four volumes this archive holds.

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Her brothers are dated to the month.

John A. Bartlett was born in Oneida County, New York, on the twenty-first of January, 1815. At twenty he began an apprenticeship at the carpenter and joiner's trade and worked at it until 1838, when he came to Milford Township and stayed. Battey says that in 1856 he and Francis Henry laid out forty-seven lots on Section 32, and that is South Milford. Ford dates the platting to 1855 in one place and 1856 in another.

Samuel A. Bartlett was born at Augusta, in the same county, on the twenty-second of September, 1810. He clerked in a store and a post office at Monroe, went to Fort Wayne in 1837 to clerk in the land office, entered a piece of Milford land while he was there and moved onto it in 1838. He was clerking in a store at Lexington when the county elected him treasurer, which it did three times. Battey's list gives him 1844 to 1853.

Then the atlas says this, and Battey never mentions it at all.

In 1856 Mr. Bartlett went to California, where he now resides.

He sat for that photograph, or sent it, from California, thirty-seven years after he left.

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The generation above her is where the record comes apart.

Their father was John C. Bartlett, born at Guilford, Connecticut, on Christmas Eve of 1785. Their mother was Betsey Arnold of Columbia County, New York, and they married in November of 1806.

Battey says the parents reached this township in 1841, and that the father died in 1847 and the mother in 1856.

The atlas says the father came in 1840, and that the mother died on the fifteenth of November, 1849, and that he survived her until the seventeenth of June, 1856.

The two books reverse which parent died first. Both of them put a death in 1856 and hang it on the opposite person.

Neither book can be checked against itself, because neither says it twice. The father's full name appears nowhere in Battey and nowhere else in the atlas, and neither of Ford's volumes mentions either parent. One statement each, from silence on both sides. The atlas gives days where Battey gives years, which is a reason to lean and not a reason to decide, and this piece does not decide.

What it does to her is push the one bracket she has. She came before her father, and her father came in 1840 or in 1841.

Her brothers' arrivals are dated to 1838. Hers is dated by the word preceded.

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The books name her four times and date her never. She is first in both lists of the eight children, she has her own line in the atlas's index of pictures where two married women lose theirs, and she has a panel on that plate the size of her brother's. What none of it gives her is a year. The only sentence in any of them that puts her anywhere in the present tense puts her in another woman's house.

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Look at the plate again once the names are off it.

The father is in the middle, inside a diamond, and his photograph is the smallest thing on the sheet. It measures about 380 pixels by 590 against his children's 770 by 970, under a third of the area. It has to be: he died in June of 1856, so whatever likeness existed was a small dark plate from the first fifteen years of American photography, and it would not enlarge. Somebody wanted him central and could not make him big, so they turned a frame on its corner and gave him the middle that way.

Around him, men on the left in both rows and women on the right.

Two of the five were already dead when this was printed. The father thirty-seven years, and John B. Nichols six, which is why the atlas says of his wife that she still survives him.

Of the three still living, one was in California.

The other two were the sisters, in one house, in Milford Township, and the book records the arrangement in a subordinate clause about somebody else.