Marrying Men
If my ancestors had spent less energy making babies, I might have inherited…I don’t know…a gently undulating Tennessee horse farm or Texas ranch land that stretches to the horizon. These kinsmen weren’t thinking of me when they coupled again and again — mostly in holy matrimony — producing progeny until they ran out of names, breaking into diminishing portions whatever dynastic wealth I might have enjoyed.
I spend untold hours in the company of these thoughtless relatives, struggling to tell the stories they couldn’t. Many were illiterate; the rest too preoccupied for reflection. For men, there were battles to fight and sod to bust. They went off to war and returned with an urgency to be fruitful and multiply, sowing and reaping the land granted to them, repeating that process in their marital beds.
For women, there were babies to be borne, delivered and tended. If they didn’t die in childbirth right away, they dedicated two decades or more to procreation. The hardy ones lived to enjoy grandchildren, often taking on the sad task of raising them after their more delicate daughters perished. The story I see most often is a widowed father hastily courting to bring home a surrogate for his motherless children.
The lives of my third great-uncle Ezekiel West (1807–1901) and his son, Martin V. West (1833–1924) exemplify these patterns. Ezekiel was the son of a renowned Baptist minister whose father emigrated from Ireland to Virginia and on to middle Tennessee, where Ezekiel became a farmer. Despite his stern looks, the ladies liked him: Ezekiel outlived four wives with whom he fathered 10 children.
First wife Ann Craighead produced three children before she and her five-year-old died within a month of each other in 1835. Ann was 27. By the following winter, Ezekiel had wooed and wed Alsie Powell, a 22-year-old who embraced Ann’s remaining two children and gave birth to six of her own. Eight years married, she died weeks after giving birth to twin boys.
That left eight step-children for wife #3 Temperance Crosslin, whom Ezekiel married almost two years after Alsie’s death. At 37, Temperance had never married. In what was likely a relief for the untried wife and stepmother, the two youngest children found homes with their mother’s kin, leaving six for the newlywed to nurture. Raising another woman’s children proved healthier than childbirth might have: Temperance lived to see 63 years. When she died in 1871, after 26 years of marriage, Ezekiel was alone, his children launched.
Three years later, Ezekiel took his final plunge into matrimony: At 67, he wed Mary Fitzpatrick, 43, and two years later, they welcomed little Sally Ann into the world. Inevitably, Mary died, and there remained Ezekiel, 82, to raise his 13-year-old daughter.
These days, such a serial widower might invite the attention of one of those spousal-murder shows the networks air Friday and Saturday nights. In fact, the age of Ezekiel’s wives at death fall well within a normal range for the time period. It was Ezekiel who was extraordinary. At birth, his expected life span would have been 38. Instead, he made it to 94.
Ezekiel saw his youngest child, Sally, marry in 1895 and, sometime in his 90’s, he moved in with his oldest son, Martin. When he died, not long after the 20th century was born, half his children had beat him to the graveyard.
Longevity was something Martin West inherited from his father, along with that stern look. They both were marrying men. Martin fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and home again in Macon County, Tennessee, he spent the rest of his life farming, marrying and making babies. Martin failed to surpass his father, but he deserves points for the war effort. His final score: three wives, eight children, 90 years of life. He died from the flu.
