Chapter 5B: Great Grandparents James and Isabella & Daughter Isabella Glennie

James and Isabella Glennie and their Daughter, Isabella

As we already know, James and Isabella arrived in North Andover in 1887 at advanced ages for the time. Their first years must have been satisfying ones, seeing their children take up lives in North America which could either be described as successful or at least promising. The family farm was bought, renovated, and provided them with a home infinitely more comfortable than their Lochrie dwelling.

James, however, was to fall ill with some now unknown malady that, while apparently not quick, was fatal. He died in 1901. Alexander, in one of the 3 poems he wrote concerning his father’s death, has this to say:

Why should we sorrow when an old man dies

Whose day has dawned on the Eternal deep,

Whose soul for Death’s emancipation cries,

And whose tired body longs to sleep;[1]

William, in his previously mentioned letters to Annie while she was visiting family in Aberdeen, writes on July 17, 1901, “Father don’t improve very much am afraid he will not get over this attack if he keeps….” By the time of his September 6^th letter to Annie, William’s father has died and he laments, “I am sure you was sorry when you heard of my poor old father being taken away from us.” He goes on to say that the great consolation in his father’s death is that he is “better off” and then relates how the minister told them (the family members) at the funeral, “that he quoted Scripture to him whey last met and so much he had by heart.” William describes there being more flowers than he had seen before at a funeral and the people attending showing “greatest respect.” The whole family, except Mary Ann and Maggie, was at James’ bedside at his death and at the funeral.

Interestingly, William apologizes to Annie for not having written on black stationery, customary then in times of mourning. In his words, “You might wonder how I have not wrote you in black but the truth of it is we have only one black sheet here, and I want to write you now. Of course I make you just as one of ourselves and you must not think that I am slighting you at all.” This seems to be another clue that Annie is already assimilating into the Glennie family with, as noted before, marriage to William now on the horizon.

Isabella lived several years after James’ death, but they were not good years. We know of her trials in her last years through Alexander’s poems and Uncle Charlie’s History. In Father’s Grave, Alexander writes in his last verse:

Oh Mither, Mither dinna greet

Nor let yer grief gang ower ye

To miss his kindly words and sweet

He’s only gane afore ye

Your ups and downs sinee first ye met

He’s nae the kind that can forget

He minds them fine and winners yet

When he’ll be comin for ye.

In a poem focused on Isabella’s grieving in the winter after James died, Alexander portrays his mother as alone, lonely, and infirm. Her children would gladly take her in, he says in MOTHER: The Winter After Father Died, but:

She fears she might be a burden so here she’d rather stay.

And she must be near the cemetery where Father lies at rest

And she keeps his chair and the Bible his constant touch had blessed

And the room they used to sleep in, she likes it still the best.

The house is growing colder, the midnight hour has tolled

Her hands are shaking with palsy, and her feet are numb with cold

And she sways and moans in anguish, and weeps in her apron’s fold.

And still she’s sitting greetin as lonely as can be

With her poor old head in her apron and her elbow on her knee

Old and withered and wrinkled, and thinking o’ you and me.

Isabella spent her last 2 years bedridden, following a stroke that left her immobile and unable to speak. Her daughter, also named Isabella, took, in Uncle Charlie’s words, “splendid care of mother.” Daughter Isabella’s fate, however, was a sad one. Overworked caring for her mother, she took sick. Her physician had her placed in the Massachusetts General Hospital, where she underwent surgery from which she never regained consciousness. Not sure that their mother could understand from their words and gestures that Isabella had died, her children carried Isabella’s body into her mother’s room so she could see that her daughter was dead. Mother Isabella died three weeks later, on Christmas Day, 1907.

James and Isabella were a remarkable couple, beloved by their children and respected by those who knew them. James seems to have been the more gregarious of the two, with Isabella reserved and modest. Their accomplishments were prodigious. They raised a large family of their own plus a niece and nephew and, through example and their love, taught them to be good, to care for one another, to love and respect their parents, and to endure hardship uncomplainingly in the quest of worthwhile ends. We see these qualities in many ways – in their children’s remaking their new farm in North Andover into a comfortable and productive home for them, in Alexander’s poems about his parents alive and in death, in William’s telling Annie of his father’s death and how the family coped with it, and most of all in daughter Isabella’s caring for her mother in her last years and at great sacrifice to herself.

James and Isabella managed, in spite of a limited formal education, their large family size, and humble status as tenant farmers, to accumulate the means to buy their own farm upon arriving in North Andover. At advanced ages, they had the unusual capability to look to the future, as they transplanted their roots deeply embedded in Strathdon, joined their children, and set off for a land unknown to them except for the promise of a better life for all.

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[1] This is from Father Dead. Alexander’s other 2 poems about James’ death are Father and Father’s Grave.