Sunday, March 31, 2013

Easter.

Quiet Easter. Called family, left a message. Had dinner with Christina's family.

Found this article.  It's worth a look for those considering whether Annie was a victim of sexual abuse.  This has always been an open question and a point of conjecture among researchers and even her relatives living today.  While I believe it to be an important question to ask, it's a dangerous one to try to answer with any certainty unless one has irrefutable proof.  Even a hundred fifty years later, sexual abuse is a potent charge and can upset historians and living descendants (as is evident from a previous book on the topic, which shall remain unnamed, but took dramatic liberties with the story that annoyed the staff at The Garst).

And while the article notes Annie had no children of her own, and speculates thus from the possibility of sexual abuse that her marriage to Frank may have been an "asexual marriage of convenience" (a common notion which is too often used in a circular manner:  "She was sexually abused, and the trauma kept her from having children."  "How do we know she was sexually abused?"  "Well, the fact that she had no children supports this likelihood."), this ignores her married (to Benjamin Grabfelder), childless elder sister Sarah Ellen, who only died in 1939 at the age of 81.  She didn't live with "The Wolves."  Is there something we should also draw from this?  And though she died young at 26, another sister, Elizabeth, had none either with husband Martin Brewer.  Nor sister Lydia with husband Joseph Stein, though she lived 'til she was 29-and-a-half.  Can we really consider Annie's childlessness a distinct feature that tells us something about that chapter of her life, or does it tell us something about the nature of the Mosey daughters, or perhaps nothing at all?

Questions usually deserve to be asked.  Some, however, do not warrant being answered when it presumes a knowledge no one has, and when other questions inspire answers of equal merit as alternatives.

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