I think T. S. Eliot was off by a few months.
Well, October isn't really cruel, but it sure is busy. That's why I've been more than a little sloppy in keeping up with the blog.
In the three weeks (oops!) since I last posted, I've traveled to Austin, Texas to represent Wofford's Phi Beta Kappa chapter at the society's triennial council, where we transacted business, elected Phi Beta Kappa senators, and granted four new chapters to universities in different parts of the country. When I got back to Spartanburg, I had to work on a talk to the Laurens County Genealogical Society, then I had to work on another Homecoming history-sermon. Last Sunday, I visited the nice people at Main Street United Methodist Church in Columbia for their annual homecoming Sunday. I talked about our connected heritage as Methodists.
In between all of that, I've been answering questions, trying to clean up in the archives a bit, keeping my two very competent student assistants busy, and trying to get back to some long-delayed processing work. This morning, I'm sending copies of obituaries from the Southern Christian Advocate to some researchers who found our website and requested copies from the index.
As I glanced over one of the obituaries, a phrase caught my eye, and I stopped to read the entire paragraph. The notice came from 1854, the deceased was named Jane Wofford. Perhaps a distant relative of Benjamin (whose 229th birthday passed largely unheralded this week), she died in 1854, the year that Wofford opened. In fact, she died on August 5, just 4 days after the college that shared her name opened.
What struck me in the obituary was the choice of words and how the meaning of some words has evolved over 150 years. From looking at so many 19th century obituaries, I know that some of these expressions were common then, but have fallen out of use since. One is the reference to someone's spouse as their "consort." The obituary begins, "Jane Wofford, consort of Joseph Wofford, Esq., died 5th Aug. in hope of the crown of life. She was in her 65th year; having become a Methodist and a professor of religionabout 30 years ago."
Wait - a professor of religion? Of course, the obituary writer meant that she was one who professed religion, not that she held a college faculty appointment.
The obituary went on to describe her as a "diffident, but untiring Christian." Diffident - I've never seen that one in an obituary before. It means lacking self-confidence, timid, or shy. Perhaps the writer really meant that she was a reserved, quiet person.
Finally, the obituary praised her, saying "Sister W. was a devoted wife, an affectionate mother, a good mistress, kind to the poor, and attentive to all her duties as a Christian." A devoted wife AND a good mistress?
This is but one of some 57,000 obituaries in the Southern Christian Advocate in its 170 years, and but one of innumerable articles in that publication. It's a periodical worth exploring some time if you're in the archives - to get a flavor of life among South Carolina's Methodists in years past.
A busy October, yes, but I'd rather be busy than not.
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