ladyyatexel

This is Mary Melissa. She was born 160 years ago today (22 Nov 1859), and she’s my Great Great Great Grandmother. These are (crops of) the photos I have of her. At least three of them were most likely taken the same day, and four of them have her wearing the same blouse. But I am still so happy to have them. I’ve been searching for who her parents are almost since I put together who she even was.

She’s listed in a genealogical book published during her lifetime, in 1931, that traces her from a man who came here from Germany in the 1700s. (The book is dedicated to tracing his family. I found it because his name is Mary Melissa’s maiden name. She’s listed as the daughter of an Elizabeth and a blank. Mary Melissa carried her mother’s maiden name as her own and she and her mother both eventually married men with the same last name (brothers with a span of 25 years between them, if the records I’ve found and my guess is right). MM is in the book listed once as the daughter of Elizabeth and then the next time we see Elizabeth she’s listed with some blanks as the grandmother of MM’s children, including my Great Great Grandmother. I don’t know what Elizabeth’s circumstance was, but several kinds could leave her with a child she gave her maiden name to. Regardless, it was something they didn’t want listed transparently, apparently.

The family went through some effort to conceal Mary Melissa’s origins. She was married off a little more than a month after she turned 15, on December 31st. The marriage was announced in an obscure local paper the following October. She was born and lived in a time between mandates for documentation for life events, so in addition to hoping to see parents listed on that very obscure wedding announcement in the main family history library in the county, I’m headed to the county seat’s court soon to see what their birth records look like prior to 1906 to see if there’s something that claims Mary Melissa.

Mary Melissa named my Great Great Grandmother after her mother, Elizabeth. She named another daughter, Margaret, after the grandmother she and Elizabeth lived with when she was a child (thanks, census!). One of her sons got a family nickname as his middle name. Most of her fifteen children have some kind of specific name connected to the people in the book. She’s absolutely connected to this family. I don’t know who her father is. There’s a suspicion it is the man Elizabeth eventually married after his first wife died, but I haven’t found anything that proves it in a hard documentation kind of way.

Mary Melissa particularly affects me for some reason. There are other speed bumps and questionable loops on the trip through this, there are stories cut tragically short, but hers is the one that obsesses me. I think about things might have been like for her. Was she told her father had died in the Civil War when she was old enough to wonder? Did they know and tell her? Every census has her living somewhere else. Was it really her idea to get married so soon? She was educated until the 8th grade and then kept house and had children until she couldn’t anymore. Several of her children died before her. Every record I can find says she was an only child. She made it to 85 years old.

I like anniversaries and significant dates and such, and Mary Melissa has been something I’ve talked about or thought about almost daily since this past summer, so I felt like screaming into the void about her on her birthday. Maybe next year I’ll have uncovered some things that cement her where she belongs.

ladyyatexel

Happy 162nd, Mary Melissa 💝

headspace-hotel

"But NORMAL People's Bodies Didn't Look Like That!" ...right?

Some of you may have seen my post about Baroque artists and their realistic depictions of human bodies as having skin and fat.

I've had a lot of negative and frankly fatphobic comments on that post, calling the people in the paintings "fat" and "obese," mostly along the lines of this:

"It's because the artists are depicting rich people, who were fat and lazy. Normal people didn't look like that!"

The idea, of course, is that these artists wouldn't have ever drawn bodies that looked like those in the Baroque paintings, if they weren't painting super-rich people that stuffed themselves with food all day.

Supposedly. We'll see how well that holds up.

Today I was in the library looking at a collection of drawings by Albrecht Dürer, and learned that in the early 1500's, Dürer tried to put together essentially a "how-to-draw" book, showing how to draw people. His work was controversial, because of his technique of "constructing" figures using rules about proportions. (A quick and easy method of inventing realistically proportioned bodies out of thin air? Cheating!!)

However, in his "constructed" drawings, Dürer had to figure out how to handle the range of variety in bodies, and ended up breaking down how to create a variety of body types in correct proportions.

I'm showing the women, to contrast with the post on Baroque paintings. Here are some of his drawings that I thought y'all should take a look at.

These are a couple of his more "average" women—the one on the left is from his drawing book, and the one on the right is one of his drawings.

Here's a "strong woman" and "A very strong, stout woman"

This is what he refers to as a "stout woman."

Here's where it gets interesting: this is what Albrecht Dürer refers to as a "peasant-type" woman

^That. That's what a "peasant" body type looks like.

He labeled this one "A peasant woman of 7 head lengths"

in case you missed it: this figure drawing by a guy in the 1500's is literally labeled as being of a peasant woman! this is what a "peasant woman" body type looks like!

He did draw similar amounts of thinner figures, but they're not particularly emphasized over the "Strong" and "Stout" figures. Nor is there exactly a "default" figure. He's just...going over the range of variations that there are?

Here's another "stout woman," covered in notes on how to draw the proportions:

now that's too technical for me to make any sense of but

this was in the 16th century!! This body type was apparently not incredibly rare in the 16th century. This body type was important enough for you to be able to draw, as an artist, in the 16th century to be handled in detail in a 16th century artist's drawing advice

In conclusion: yes this is just what people look like, yes it's important to know how to draw fat bodies, even this dude from the early 1500's is telling you so, Die Mad About It

all of this is from "The complete drawings of Albrecht Dürer" by Walter L. Strauss

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

"But NORMAL People's Bodies Didn't Look Like That!" ...right?