Woman Born in 1837 Talks About the Deathbed Confession Her Mother Made That She Wishes She'd Never

Woman Born in 1837 Talks About the Deathbed Confession Her Mother Made That She Wishes She'd Never Heard Harriet Vane Aldrich (née Cogwell) (1837–after 1930) was born in Washington County, Vermont, the daughter of a steady hill-farm family — Congregational, respectable, the kind of household that endured things quietly and left certain questions unopened. In April of 1888, when Harriet was fifty-one, she sat beside her dying mother, Prudence, and was told something that could no longer be acted upon and could never be confirmed. Before her marriage, Prudence had been involved for a short time with a neighboring farmer, Emmett Deane; when her first son Edwin was born seven months after the wedding, she carried for the next fifty years the private fear that he might not have been Silas Cogwell’s child after all. She never told her husband. She never told Edwin. She never told anyone until the last days of her life, when she placed the uncertainty in Harriet’s hands and died four days later. What Harriet is accounting for, at ninety-three, is not a solved scandal, but the burden of an unanswered question — one that touches the dead, alters nothing outwardly, and yet has lived inside her for forty years. She is the last person who knows it. She is speaking now. #1800s #historicalnarratives #19thcentury