For Mother’s Day, I’m writing in honor of Gertrude Weaver Witter Richey, who saw her share of heartache and then some.

She lost her young, ambitious husband Jay to black diphtheria in 1911 while pregnant with their fourth child, but the Witter family circled around her. Her kids frequently went to stay at Uncle Ora’s farm, and her oldest son, LeRoy (my great-grandfather) stayed with his cousin Marjorie, attending public school in Olean NY and generally becoming the handsome, popular young man his father would have been proud of—the kind of guy who would eventually not only attend the reunions of the Joshua and Nancy Witter descendants, but occasionally host them, and frequently serve as an officer for the group as well.

As for Gertrude, she remained active on the “Witter roster” even after she remarried in 1921. And how could she not? Her kids were Witters, through and through. They were known around town, a beloved, social family with many friends.

I’ll allow myself the leeway of a bit of speculation here. Through the stories and the news clippings and the photographs, I’ve gotten just enough of a sense of the family to feel that I know what it meant to be a Witter in the Hinsdale/Olean area in the first third of the twentieth century. They were boisterous, I’m willing to bet—talkers, storytellers, jokesters. The consummate extroverts, athletic, willing to accept any half-decent reason to laugh, and quick to come to their neighbors’ aid. Although I’ve never seen a picture of Jay Witter to know what he looked like, I suspect Gertrude saw him in her boys, more every day as they grew into young men.

And on August 23, 1936, when her second son Richard died at age 31 in a horrific boating accident on Cuba Lake, I think her heart was never the same after that.

The details of the accident that were printed in the paper were nothing any mother should have to read about her child, and the coroner’s inquest remained page-two news for most of that week. Criminal and civil negligence trials followed, and though listing them out would detract from the story I want to tell, they may well be related, because on June 9, 1937, only a short time after the newspapers quieted about the accident and subsequent proceedings, this brief item ran in the Olean Times Herald.

June 9, 1937, Olean Times Herald, via Ancestry.com

What on this earth compares to a mother’s heartbreak?

Dick G. Witter (1905-1936)
(aka Richard G. Witter, aka Rufus Gardiner Witter)

When I visited the Maplehurst Cemetery and snapped a photo of Dick G Witter’s headstone, I was none the wiser. There’s no trace of Gertrude’s efforts now, of course. She herself died only two years later.

From this side of history, we have no idea whether the damage amounted to a mower’s carelessness or serious vandalism. I can certainly imagine Gertrude’s frame of mind amid grief and court dates, though. She had only one filter to see it through.

We like to delight our moms with flowers for Mother’s Day. Gertrude bought her own, for Richard but also for herself. Flowers only give joy to the living. After her son was taken from her, how those stolen flowers must have echoed that wound.

Flowers and laughter fade—and even so, transient beauty is worth its fleeting moment. Weathered stones remain—but so do the echoes of those Witter traits I find between the lines of the newspaper archives. I’d like to think Gertrude would be pleased and proud of the generous, boisterous talkers and storytellers among the Witters I know.