[this is an edited excerpt from a book I am currently working on.]
Although there are countless facts about my great-grandmother, Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild, I don’t know, I have recently learned this. My grandfather’s mother, seventeen-year-old Amy Prescott Faulkner, entered the very first class of a brand-new Wellesley College in 1875; she dropped out after one year. My father, vocal that his mother had gone to Radcliffe, never mentioned this. (Like Amy, my “Cliffy” Grandma did not graduate with her classmates either.) Perhaps my father never knew; perhaps his paternal grandmother, unlike mine, was not a storyteller. But most likely Dad, very much a product of his times, may have dated Wellesley women, but utterly failed to appreciate this intriguing bit o’ distaff history.
So how did I discover this? Because in 1940, ten years after husband had died and now living in a modest cottage in Winchester, Massachusetts, Mrs. Benjamin Wild donated two autograph books, signed by her classmates, to her alma mater. Almost as if she’d understood that Wellesley College would consider these page-after-page tributes to the art of nineteenth-century penmanship of historical significance. And therefore, like other alums’ artifacts donated to the college, would be archived in Wellesley College’s Clapp Library. Eventually, her contribution would be digitized. Almost as if my great-grandmother had known that in 2025, one of her descendants would wonder: Who was Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild? And when making an online search, that descendent would discover Mrs. Wild’s 1940 gift online—and would gratefully leaf through those exquisite little books. Almost as if Amy had known how touching it would be for that descendant to read these exquisitely written names, maiden names, of course, the autograph signers’ hometowns—Savannah, Dubuque, Boston—beautifully penned in smaller letters beneath.
I’d hoped to discover why my great-grandmother had dropped out; sadly, penned names, no matter how artistically written, disclose very little. I did glean a couple of things well-worth my long and rainy trip to Wellesley, however, one of historic import, one significant to my current work.
More than once, Amy’s friends seemed to indicate that during Wellesley’s first year, there may have been some confusion—or tension?—around its identity as a college. More than once, the signers referenced “Wellesley Female Seminary,” the name of the original, preceding institution; one woman wrote “Wellesley—?” As if to say, “What is this place? A finishing school or a college?”
Second, I came upon a gap where two or three pages from that autograph book had obviously been torn out. And was reminded of all the gaps, all the shadowed moments, all the unrecorded or unremembered or binned stories; all the ways we can only know through a glass darkly. Especially when it comes to family history, I think.
It’s almost as if Amy Prescott Faulkner Wild understood that!