Childhood Memories

Millie and Grant

Millicent Chapman was born 22 April 1913 in the Tucker House on Washington Ave in Belleville, New Jersey to William Osborne Chapman and Sarah Eleanor Grant.  She was baptized in the First Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, NJ on 14 Dec 1913.  The family lived in various residence in New Jersey before finally settling in Peapack in 1922.  Millie recalled that at each of the residences her father build a gazebo of some sort.

"I believe I had a pretty good life. Oh, I fell in my crib one day and hit the railing.  One front tooth was missing and my mother couldn't find it anywhere. She took me to the dentist. ( I enjoyed the up and down of the chair). He said he thought it (the tooth) had been pushed back up into the gum and in a short time would reappear. Which was exactly what happened. It was always slightly shorter than the others."

Grant, Millie and Sadie with the Model A 1922

Perhaps not a memory but hearsay, "For the first year of my life, my Mother's doctor at that time, told her to give me nothing but milk, until I finally when 1 year old refused to touch it anymore. And didn't again until I came back from overseas - 31 years later. I always ate poorly, which my mother attributed to a lack of taste for food, but I've always been healthy."


Millie remembers her first car....  

Another memory of growing up was her dog for a day.....Some friends had given her a puppy, however, it was not housebroken and it was underfoot so her mother made her return it the next day.

Millie

What can one say about their mother in law?  When I first met her under less than easy circumstances I felt somewhat intimidated, even though she was very kind.  But, as the days and years went by it was impossible not to love and admire this intelligent, brave, shy, talented, fun-loving woman who shared her only child with me.

This is the first post on this new blog, dedicated to Millicent Chapman Trindle and her ancestors.  Millie, herself, was interested in genealogy.  Over the years she told many family stories, usually with an edge of humor.

She was also a note maker, we inherited boxes and boxes of notes, many on little scraps of paper.  Somehow they never turned into the full stories we had hoped for. The many scrappy duplicates left me wondering whether she was trying for better handwriting, or thinking that writing it down again might spur further memories.

In this blog I hope to turn those notes into stories of her life, and the lives of the family she knew or sought.  It makes me a little sad that the wealth of online records we have today came just a little too late for her to have benefitted from the ability to track some lines a few generations further into the past.  But hopefully her granddaughters, great grandchildren, nieces and nephews and more distant relatives will enjoy this journey through her life and ancestry.