My Family Tree

California, Death Index
Name: Nellie C Chatfield
Event Type: Death
Event Date: 02 Jan 1956
Event Place: Butte, California
Birth Date: 07 Mar 1873
Birthplace: Missouri
Gender: Female
Father's Name: Chamberlin
Mother's Name: Hoy
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Grave stone has Nellie C Chatfield probably because she was a Chamberlin.
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United States Census, 1930
Name: Nellie Chatfield
Event Place: Chico, Butte, California
Gender: Female
Age: 54
Marital Status: Married
Race: White
Relationship to Head of Household: Head
Birth Year (Estimated): 1876
Birthplace: Missouri
Father's Birthplace: New York
Mother's Birthplace: Pennsylvania
Sheet Letter: A
Sheet Number: 7
Nellie Chatfield Head F 54 Missouri
Roy E Chatfield Son M 29 Colorado
Arden I Chatfield Son M 19 Montana
Ina J Chatfield Dau F 17 Montana
Noriene E Chatfield Dau F 14 California
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USA Census, 1940
Name: Nellie Chatfield
Event Place: Chico Judicial Township, Butte, California
Gender: Female
Age: 67
Marital Status: Married
Race: White
Relationship to Head of Household: Head
Birthplace: Missouri
Birth Year (Estimated): 1873
Last Place of Residence: Same House
District: 4-12
Family Number: 39
Sheet Number and Letter: 2A
Line Number: 33
Affiliate Publication Number: T627
Affiliate Film Number: 192
Digital Folder Number: 005455019
Image Number: 00611
Household Gender Age Birthplace
Head Nellie Chatfield F 67 Missouri
Son Ray E Chatfield M 39 Colorado
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Headstones, History and a Little Hearsay:

In 1894 Charles Henry Chatfield married Nellie Belle Chamberlin—a no-nonsense Catholic girl. Nellie was stubborn and headstrong with a mind of her own and although exceedingly religious—she refused to consummate their marriage. In frustration, Charles took his new bride to the priest who married them. Father Carr sat Nellie down and instructed her to go home and be a dutiful wife. Nine months later Nellie bore her first child—and over the next twenty years—nine more.

1915: CALIFORNIA My grandmother started her crazy quilt in 1895, the same year she started her family. Twenty years later, with the birth of my mother, Noreen Ellen CHATFIELD, she completed them both.

During Nellie's first period of confinement (it was improper for pregnant and nursing women to be seen in public) her quilted piece grew. Her fine hands stitched rivers of gold, roads of onyx, and fences of pearl, connecting salvaged pieces of fabric—of little girls petticoats, of Sunday-go-to-meetin' bests, of Grandpa's fine vest, a bit of a wedding dress, a narrow strip of a cambric shawl. Patches of stripes and checks were stitched and cross-stitched with a jigsaw of shapes and hues: brocade rectangles of ochre and mustard; satin triangles of emerald and indigo; poplin squares of carmine and pale rose; fine wools circlets of cerulean and violet. She saved her sewing scraps in a flour sack until she had a quiet moment to stitch the patchwork of smooth velvets, shiny taffetas and bumpy poplins into a multicolored canvas for her embroidered birds and butterflies and sweet honeybees that winged across her quilted legacy.

Over the years her bridle paths of alabaster threads gradually defined a landscape: a random patchwork of cattle-ranches, rice fields and farm lands viewed through the keen eyes of a soaring red-tailed hawk. In her ankle-length skirts and her high-necked long-sleeved blouses, Nellie rocked in her chair, her children in bed, her round sewing frame on her lap—silently laboring over her quilt, her only time of peace and solitude. By the lamp she stitched zigzags of rainbow, dapples of color and splashes of hope, creating a cover considerable enough to warm a generation of Chatfield's.

As the family traveled by horse and buckboard through dust and storm, homesteading parts of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, the blanket, carefully folded and boxed, traveled with her. I can't imagine living through those times—through the harsh Rocky Mountain summers and winters, praying for better weather, for water and a good crop, for relief from the grasshoppers and the mosquitoes and the incessant biting of horse flies. Praying for her children down with whooping cough, croup and ague—supplicating, kneeling, genuflecting—praying to God for everyone—but herself.

I can't imagine every day having to haul water trying to keep things clean. Making one-pot meals in a black cast-iron kettle. The daily baking of buttermilk biscuits and apple cobblers and rough wheat breads. Canning bushels of peaches and rows of corn to make it through another winter. Snow to shovel. Wood to chop. Constant mouths to feed. Rain. Mud. Snow. Animals dying, blizzards, buckboards, wagon trains, rattlesnakes, tornadoes, droughts—and babies. Twenty years of birthing, nursing, rocking, bathing, and changing crying babies. Although Nellie wouldn't have taken a million bucks for any one of her children—she wouldn't have paid a nickel for another.

Maybe my grandmother's crazy quilt kept her sane. With the passage of time, like the passage of her family, its threads—winding and wandering through the generations—have worn, frayed, and unraveled. But like her family, its colors have withstood, endured and upheld the tapestry of life.

Brilliantly.

Catherine (Clemens) Sevenau

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