LAST MINUTE MUSINGS: Rosetta Bible helps decipher family history

Growing up as I did, roaming the rooms of my hometown newspaper office, I suppose I picked up on things that other kids didn’t.

I remember the ins and outs of a fire that destroyed much of downtown Williamsport when I was seven, the outcomes of court cases from around the same time and a ton of local history culled from the bound volumes in the back room.

One other thing I remember is that Review Republican Publisher Mary Ann Akers (a card-carrying Democrat, ironically) wrote a couple of different columns, depending on the week, under the alternate titles of “Just Between Us” and “Just Happen to Have.” I suppose we can file this one under the latter, though it is a bit more personal than some photo or artifact of a random resident dropped by the paper.

For what I hold in my hand is a piece of my wife’s family history — the much-coveted family Bible, in fact.

But here’s the thing: This family Bible hasn’t been in family hands for quite some time, upward of 70 years if my amateur sleuthing skills are worth anything.

Still, it did spark some enlightening conversations with one of the two remaining living people whose names are logged in the pages of the family register.

It’s a sort of Rosetta Stone, if you will. But that will make more sense in a minute.

It started off almost two weeks ago with an email that opened, “Yes, this may be the weirdest email you receive today.”

Buckle up then. I love weird.

And it was weird. It was from Lora Scott, whom I know chiefly for her role on the Putnam County Board of Zoning Appeals but who was also a North Putnam schoolmate of my late father-in-law Scot Evens.

So Lora knows the family and a bit of its history. In the few sentences of her weird email she told me that while browsing Putnam County Chatter, she had learned that the Etcheson family Bible was for sale on Etsy.

Now, Etcheson is the maiden name of family matriarch Thursa Evens, whom I’ve come to call Grandma and whom my children affectionately know as Great-Gram.

Many of you know her in other capacities — longtime DePauw employee, former Almost Home pastry chef, wife of late North Putnam teacher/administrator Norman and probably the most loyal volunteer the town of Bainbridge has ever known.

So, I clicked on the link and, sure enough, there were some familiar names, Thursa and her brothers Warren (the family called him Tinker), Kenny and Gerald, as well as Raymond and Rosetta, my wife’s great-grandparents whom she never met.

Based on the inscription near the front, this Bible belonged to the late Rosetta Etcheson.

Of course, we had to purchase the Bible.

At this point, many thanks are due to Kim Salsman, who not only sold me the Bible but, being based right here in Greencastle, was willing to meet me at Kroger one day last week to make the exchange.

She couldn’t really share much insight, saying she had picked the tome up at a thrift shop. It was a nice conversation, though.

Doing a bit of investigating myself, I came to the realization that the Bible may have originally been in family hands for a relatively short period of time, only about a decade in fact.

Though Raymond and Rosetta were married in 1918, the Bible was actually printed in 1941 in Glasgow, Scotland, of all places.

And dates of milestones were meticulously scrawled in the family register, right up until 1951. For Raymond’s death on April 2, 1951 is recorded, but nothing later. Not Gerald’s marriage nor Rosetta’s death.

“We’ll get an answer when Grandma sees it,” I thought.

Well, maybe not, but we got a whole lot more.

So, Nicole and I took Thursa out for dinner at the Putnam Inn last Friday. After we had ordered our food, I got the Bible out and set it before her, referring to it only as “a piece of history I think you’ll enjoy.”

When she opened it to the first page and saw her mother’s name written at the top, she snapped it back closed.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, a curious smile creeping onto her face.

So I told her the story, peppering it with questions.

“Did someone in the family lose or get rid of it?”

“I really don’t know.”

“It was printed in the UK during the war, so did one of your older brothers perhaps buy it over there?”

“No, they were in the Pacific.”

If you’re in this line of work long, you learn it’s often best to sit back and not get in the way of the story, so that’s what I did next, of course putting the Bible itself away when my country fried steak arrived.

Rosetta Evans, we learned, grew up in Illinois. Note the difference in spelling from what became her daughter’s married name.

She was the youngest of 11 children with an older brother who moved to the Bainbridge area, took a wife and had children. When his wife passed away, Rosetta spent a summer during high school on the Bainbridge farm, helping her brother care for the little ones.

While in our fair county, she caught the eye of one Raymond Etcheson, a Sunday school superintendent three-and-a-half years her senior.

Rosetta returned the next summer, and eventually did not go back to Illinois, much to the chagrin of a native girl who was quite smitten with young Mr. Etcheson.

Raymond and Rosetta were married on Jan. 25, 1918, just weeks after Raymond had buried his mother and days before he shipped out for World War I.

He returned from Europe with discharge papers identifying his occupation as hardware management, so that’s the business he went into, opening a store on Main Street in his hometown. The building still stands. Though it was once the hardware store and Masonic lodge, it now houses apartments.

The hardware business was quite good to the Etchesons, as Thursa described the home of her youth as one of the nicest in town, with four bedrooms upstairs and running water. (This was the 1930s in rural Indiana, after all.)

Raymond eventually got out of the hardware business, though, later buying land near Cloverdale and trying his hand at farming. After a few years of that, though, Rosetta was off to California with Gerald, the only child still at home, to enroll him in Hoover High School in San Diego.

Raymond followed after the crops were in, and the couple tried to operate a restaurant. This venture failed within the year and the family was back in Putnam County.

Raymond’s next act, his final act as it turned out, was the construction of a new home on Waterworks Hill, just west of what was then State Road 43 (now U.S. 231).

While there were finishing touches to put on the home when Raymond died on April 2, 1951, Thursa said it was livable, so that’s exactly where Rosetta lived for the time being.

The building still stands on Waterworks Hill, and many of you likely know it as the one-time home of Kersey Music/Greencastle Music Center.

The remaining 20 or so years of Rosetta’s life were frequently in motion. Not old enough for Social Security, she got a job as the hostess at the DePauw Union tea room, but that didn’t pay the bills. She wound up living with Thursa, Norman and their young family until health concerns laid her low.

She recovered, though, and eventually made her way to Indianapolis, where she took a job, but found herself caring for a number of the aging fellow residents of her apartment building.

And so, in her 50s, she decided she wanted to become a practical nurse. In the mid-1950s, Indiana law did not allow a woman her age to become a nurse. However, opportunity knocked — where else? — in California.

Eldest son Tinker, now established as an economics professor at the University of Washington, had connections in Southern California. So, Rosetta ventured back to the Golden State, became a nurse, and lived many more happy years in San Diego, not only nursing but also serving as the pianist/organist for her church.

Eventually her health did fail, and she had to return to Indiana. Her fellow church members got her a plane ticket so that Thursa only had to pick her up from the airport. They even crated up all her belongings and shipped them back to Indiana as well.

Perhaps it was then — either the move to or from California — that the Bible lost its way. It does appear that it happened on this end of the trek, as I purchased it from right here in Greencastle, not San Diego or parts unknown along the way.

In the end, I suppose it’s not the story of this Bible that I was really concerned with, but the people it represents. As I said earlier, there are only two people listed in that family history who are still living. The other, Kenny, is 96 and can’t hear well enough to have shared the kind of stories Thursa did.

As for her, she’s 94, still a good storyteller and can hear well enough, with a hearing aid at least.

But we’re not all that fortunate. My mom died at 65. My dad was 78, but had lost most of his memories to dementia years earlier. My grandparents are likewise departed.

I never asked them to tell their stories but wish I had.

All I’m saying to you is, if you want to know where you came from, ask while you still have time. Sit them down, jog their memories, ask a question or two and then shut up. Let them tell their stories and stay the heck out of the way.

Record it on audio or video. Write it down. Just don’t lose it.

You’ll have a lot of regrets if you do.