Hannah and John E. Atwater

Hannah Atwater was an Enos, or an Enoes. The county history of 1882 spells it both ways, in the biographies of two of her sons, written up under different townships. It says she was born in Pennsylvania. It also says, in the other sketch, that she and her husband were both natives of the Empire State, and Ford's volume in 1920 says the same. Nothing gives her a date.

She married Thomas S. Atwater, a blacksmith, in Pennsylvania, where their sons were born and where he worked at the trade. Ford records that she was his second wife, that the first was a Miss Conner and that there was a daughter, Margaret. In 1855 the family came to Lima Township, bought two hundred acres about a mile northwest of the village, and he gave up the forge for the land. They were Free Will Baptists. There were four sons: Myron, Charles L., John E. and Monroe. Her husband died in 1872, or in 1870, depending on which of his sons' biographies is open. She died in 1875.

That is the whole of it, and none of it is hers. Every sentence above comes out of a life of Thomas S. Atwater, or of Myron, or of Charles L. She has no biography in any of the four volumes this archive holds. No birth, no marriage date, no age at death, no parents, and no forename for any Enos.

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Leaf 35 of the 1874 county atlas printed her farm. Her husband had been dead two years, or four.

The plate carries six lithographed views in three rows of two. Hers is at the top right, a farmstead on open ground, a plain gabled house and a shed at the front, a larger house behind under trees, and a man driving a horse at speed along the road between them.

The caption beneath it reads RES. OF HANNAH AND JOHN E. ATWATER, SEC. 24, LIMA TP.

The John E. of that caption is her third son. This is a widow and one of her sons, and her name is first.

The atlas lists its own pictures on its contents page, under VIEWS. The entry for that plate reads Atwater, John E. and a page number, and that is all of it.

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The list is not short of room and it does not abbreviate anybody. Every entry in it is one name on one line with a page against it, in a single alphabetical run. Three of those names are women.

Butler, Widow C.

Latta, Martha L.

Mallow, Mrs. C.

Each of the three has her own line. Each plate agrees with the line. The Butler view is captioned RES. OF WIDOW C. BUTLER, SEC. 25, CLEAR SPRING TP. The Mallow view is captioned RES. OF MRS. C. MALLOW, ONTARIO, LIMA TP., LAGRANGE CO. Martha Latta's sits on leaf 63 between Zopher Case's and S. K. Ruick's, lettered and laid out exactly as theirs are, RES. OF MARTHA L. LATTA, SEC. 26, EDEN TOWNSHIP.

So the 1874 volume knows how to list a woman. It does it three times.

One of the three is on Hannah Atwater's own plate. Mrs. C. Mallow's house is at the foot of leaf 35, two panels below the Atwater view, and she is in the index under her own line.

Hannah Atwater is the one person in the volume who is on a plate and not on the list.

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Nineteen years later the county's second atlas stops losing women by accident.

Its index of illustrations either gives a woman a line of her own or files her inside her husband's, and there is no third thing in it. The five entries are set out in Still lives with Mrs. J. B. Nichols, and they are not repeated here.

What that piece does not carry is what the same index does to the men.

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Leaf 69 photographs eleven of the county's lawyers and judges and prints all eleven names in a block beneath them. James S. Drake, Joseph D. Ferrall, Otis L. Ballou, and eight more. The index entry is Bench and Bar and a page number.

Leaf 103 photographs the Methodist Episcopal church at LaGrange with eleven of its pastors and trustees ranged around it, and names all eleven. The index entry is M. E. Church Pastors and Trustees.

Leaf 6 is thirteen county officers of 1892, each named under his office. Auditor, clerk, treasurer, sheriff, recorder, superintendent, surveyor, coroner. It has no index entry at all.

Thirty-five men, and the index names none of them.

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What separates the men from the women is not whether the name survives. It is how it goes.

A man loses his name when he is one of a body, and the body is what gets carried: a bar, a board of trustees, a slate of officers. Every one of those entries names something that exists whether or not he is in it.

No man in either volume is filed inside another individual's entry. Nothing in the 1893 index reads Nichols, C. G., and husband.

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The county history of 1882 had already made the same decision, and it made it both ways inside one book.

Its list of LaGrange County portraits runs twenty-four names. Twenty-two are men under their own names. Two are women.

Davis, Mrs. Hezekiah

Kent, Mrs. Orvin

Both plates are signed in script under the portrait. Sarah R. Davis signs her own name, which is the turn Davistown and Summeytown is built on. The Kent plate on leaf 207 is signed the same way, a woman's forename and the surname Kent, with EDEN TP. in small capitals beneath it. Battey's Eden Township sketch, four hundred pages on, has Orvin Kent marrying Drizella Tweedy in December of 1840, the first child born to Robert and Elizabeth Tweedy after they came to America from Ireland.

Then the same volume lists Noble County's thirty-nine portraits a few pages later.

Hall, Lucinda

Weston, Catherine

No honorific and no husband, in the form the men get.

One book. Two lists. Both practices.

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Leaf 111 of the 1893 atlas carries four photographs on one sheet. John B. Howe and his house. Charles G. Nichols and his. A small brick vault in the Lima cemetery with BURNELL cut in the stone over the door. And two oval portraits side by side, an old man and an old woman, the same size, captioned Samuel Burnell and Wife.

The index gives that sheet four lines. One of them is Burnell, Samuel and wife. The one directly beneath it is Burnell Burial Vault.

Her name was Mary, and the four volumes of published county history carry it twice.

Battey has it in 1882, inside Samuel's own sketch, where on the fourth of April 1839 he married Miss Mary A. Mason, born in New York State on the twenty-ninth of November, 1817.

Ford has it in 1920, inside her grandson's biography, where Ella Burnell's parents were Samuel and Mary (Mason) Burnell, who settled in Greenfield Township about 1831.

Both times it is inside a description of a man.

So is every sentence anybody can write about Hannah Atwater.

The building with Mary Burnell's married name over the door has a line of its own.