by | Aug 20, 2024 | Karen's Korner
Francis B. Woodbury was born in Bolton, Massachusetts in 1857, the son of Frank M. and Julia Bailey Woodbury. His father is no longer living in 1870, and he is living in Bolton in Worcester Co Mass living with his mother and brother at mother’s parents’ farm. By 1880, he had moved to Middlesex, Somerville, Massachusetts and was living with cousins while working as a telephone clerk. He married eight years later at Bulfinch Place Unitarian Church to Annie L Clark, and they made their home at 23 Bromley Street in Roxbury.
While residing in Roxbury, Francis was elected secretary at the annual National Spiritualists Association meetings, 1894-1897. He wrote to the Buffalo News, 18 April 1895, about their statement that Spiritualism was not expanding. “The fact is that spiritualism is progressing rapidly all over the world, and there has been a very large number of societies organized in the last three months and one of our weekly papers gained 2000 subscribers in that time.”
The Progressive Thinker 3 October 1896 wrote, “The efficient secretary, Francis B Woodbury, has been a prominent worker in Spiritualistic circles for nearly twenty years, and the charge of inexperience and over-zealous youth cannot be laid at his door.” His wife, Annie, was also involved with Spiritualism. At an1896 meeting in Boston she gave tests and readings. She also attended Mass Convention of Spiritualists in Feb.
Francis was elected secretary in 1897 at the Annual Convention of NSA, an important year for women’s rights. “Two-thirds of the audience at to-day’s sessions of the National Spiritualist Association were women.” That year, resolutions were adopted looking to the “liberation of women,” setting out that women had been kept long enough in the position of Indians or idiots, and that women had helped for centuries to build up homes without having partnership. In the discussion on educational facilities the support of spiritual schools was advocated. Delegate Sprague said he had placed his children in the Red Bush Institute because his “spiritual guide commanded it,” and had been opposed to it “till an angel told him to do it.”
The Lawrence Daily Journal, 30 December 1897, wrote that the Secretary spoke at the National NSA meeting in Cleveland and said, “He said that so-called magicians did things which mediums accomplished, but the former resorted to trickery, while the power of the later was due to spiritual influence. He said there is little difference between the mesmeric and trance conditions, and, inasmuch as there was no doubt about the genuineness of the former, there should be no doubt about the latter.”
Francis was voted out as NSA secretary in 1898 but still continued to participate. He gave addresses like at Lookout Mountain, discussed the history of the organization, and was concerned with people being arrested for their beliefs.
Frances and Annie lived in Greenfield, Massachusetts in 1900 where he worked as a night watchman, and she was a waitress. They had a daughter, Ruth, and later moved to the nearby Spiritualist community of Lake Pleasant. Francis became involved in politics, supporting the Democratic Party and became secretary for Lake Pleasant Independent Order of Scalpers.
In 1915, Francis became involved with the Unitarian church in Springfield, Massachusetts. He was a delegate at Unitarian meeting in 1920 and The Church of Unity treasurer in 1921. By 1923, he was the Springfield First Spiritualist Church president and in 1924 sexton at the Church of Unity.
Francis died in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1924. At the time, he had been a resident there for 18 years He was a member of the Church of Unity and the United Order of Workmen. Annie and Ruth Dionne were still living.
by | Aug 12, 2024 | Karen's Korner
Wilbur S. Wandell was born in 1847 in Michigan, the son of William and Eliza Wandell. His life had barely begun when his father died in 1852. Wilbur’s first marriage was to Callie Norton before 1870 when she was a teenager. Wilbur worked as a carpenter in Kalamazoo, and they had two daughters, Grace and Maude. There is no record of a divorce, but Callie lived with her daughter Grace in Battle Creek, Michigan until her death in 1913, keeping the name Wandell and saying she was married.
Wilbur married Nancy Waugh in Morrow County, Ohio in 1895. They lived in Fairfield County, Ohio in 1900 with their son, Joy. Their daughter Elizabeth was born before they moved to Fresno, California before 1910.
Wilbur was active in facilitating Spiritualist camp meetings in Michigan and Ohio before he moved to Fresno. In 1887, he oversaw the camp meeting at Frazers’ Grove, Vicksburg Michigan “He reports that active efforts are making to render the camp meeting at that place a great success another season.” In 1890 and1891, he was president of the Vicksburg Spiritualists’ Religious Association which had been running Frazer’s grove camp meeting since 1883.
He was known as a meeting “pioneer and ran the religious camp association central department in Ashley, Delaware county Ohio in1890. The Light of Truth, 4 March 1893, published a piece by Samuel Waugh which described a séance in Ashley, Ohio that was attended by Waugh’s family, Mr. W. S. Wandell, the medium’s manager, and Benjamin F. Foster, the medium. In 1897, Wilbur was a delegate when they formed the association of Ohio Spiritualists. By that time, he was living in the Spiritualist community, Summerland Beach in California.
The family was living in Fresno, California in 1910. Wilbur was a plumber, and member of the Spiritualist church, IOOF lodge and Knights of Pythias Lodge. He died in 1928 following an illness of several weeks at age of 79. Nannie was still alive in 1950 and lived with daughter Elizabeth in Fresno.
by | Aug 6, 2024 | Karen's Korner
Ida P. Andrews was born about 1852 to fish dealer, Francis, and Sarah Andrews. She married Fred O. Smith, a jeweler, in 1874 when he was 25 and she was 23. They had a daughter who was born in 1876, but the marriage did not last long. By 1880, Ida was living at home with her parents, daughter, Francis (Fannie), and two brothers, in Providence, Rhode Island. The census recorded that she was divorced.
In 1884, Mrs. Ida P. Andrews Smith married Lewis L. Whitlock according to the Boston Evening Transcript. The couple, from Providence, Rhode Island, were given a party, according to the Banner of Light, the following year. L.L. Whitlock was editor of Facts Publishing Company and very active in with Spiritualism the Boston area. Ida was active in her own circles.
The Banner of Light, 5 September 1891, reported on Ida at the Onset Bay meeting. “After reading a poem conveying the thought that we are ‘only remembered by what we have done,’ she proceeded to speak upon “Spiritualism and Its Relation to the World’s Growth and Development,” Spiritualism, she said combines religion and philosophy. It has demonstrated the fact that there is no death, and that those who have passed from this into the other life can and do return. The phenomena of Spiritualism are the working-tools of our profession. They do not come into the world as playthings, but as educators—something more than to teach that man lives beyond the death of the physical body.”
During the 1890s, Ida was a speaker at many meetings in New England and New York. She attended Lily Dale and the National Spiritualist Conventions as well as the Providence Spiritualist Association events. The titles of her lectures included: “Faith without Works is Dead,” “The New Heaven and the New Life,” and “The Spread of Spiritual Philosophy.”
In the Banner of Light, 28 October 1893, Ida wrote that she was in Buffalo. “During the month of September, it was my privilege and pleasure to speak to the First Spiritualist Society of this city.” She continued. “I was very much impressed with the interest manifested by young people, many of whom came to me after the meeting and said they were earnestly seeking light, by forming a circle for the development of the mediumistic gifts which different ones had learned they possessed.”
Ida was also President of the Ladies’ Industrial Society in Boston, advertised as a Psychometrist who gave readings from a lock of hair and handwriting, was a state agent for the Rhode Island National Spiritualist Association, and was known in Maine as a speaker and psychometric reader. She travelled to England at least twice in the early 1900s, and after being widowed moved in with her brothers in Providence. Her brother Frank was also active in the Spiritualist community. By 1930, she was living with her daughter Frances Dixon, both widowed, in Manhattan.
by | Jul 29, 2024 | Karen's Korner
Frederick Llewellyn Hovey Willis was born in 1830 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Lorenzo and Eleanor Willis. She died in childbirth. He knew many writers including Emerson, Fuller and Alcott. They founded Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Mass as an idealistic social democracy location where Hawthorne did his first literary work.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 13 April 1885 told his story of becoming involved with Spiritualism, “I was a young man of twenty-one years when I first felt the manifestations which have since become so familiar. I had left Cambridge temporarily for the benefit of my health, and was voyaging to South America. Sea sickness seized me violently and I kept to my stateroom during the earlier part of the voyage. By and by I began to notice strange things transpiring in my little stateroom—for instance knockings—and frequently invisible hands touching me. When I became well again, I thought that these things were merely the delusions of sickness, but when I arrived at Rio Janeiro, I soon found that some subtle changes had taken place in me which had developed some previously unknown powers of my soul, if you please. I could tell what people were thinking of by looking at them, and I knew if a person was writing to me and what he or she was writing about. Other spiritualistic phenomena happened about me, but I fought off the notion of its being of supernatural origin till I returned to Boston.” Later he said, “I had never previously had any medical knowledge at all except a smattering which one picks up in the public schools. In the hands of the spirits, however, I became an old man with a perfect knowledge of medicine.”
Frederick’s interest in Spiritualism caused problems at first. According to the Spiritual Telegraph, 2 May 1857, “The case of Mr. Willis, a suspended Divinity student at Cambridge, is creating an unusual ferment among the clergy of Boston and vicinity; and the excitement is rapidly spreading in all directions, and among all classes of people. Mr. Willis is a remarkable medium for physical manifestation; and at a recent sitting at which Professor Eustis of Cambridge Faculty was present, Mr. Willis’ foot and the Professor’s came in contact under the table; when the learned Professor seized Mr. Willis’ limb, and accused it, or its owner, of deception. This led to the suspension, on the part of the faculty of the College, of Mr. Willis.” Reverend Thomas Higginson who attended the meeting said that the accusations were not proven. He published his observations about musical instruments located under the table being played and moved, and accordion on Mr. Willis’ lap playing tunes at request of the attendees, faint lights appeared upon the table that looked like “glow-worms,” and other lights flickered around the room, that the accordion played when it was on Mr. Higginson’s lap, out of reach of Mr. Willis, watched the guitar play without anyone touching it, and felt hands grasping his feet, but he wasn’t sitting close to Mr. Willis.
After graduating from Harvard Divinity School, Frederick was ordained a Unitarian minister. He lived in Michigan where he abandoned the ministry to enter the Homeopathic Medical School in New York City. He married Love Whitcomb of New Hampshire in 1858 and they had a daughter while practiced medicine in Elmira and Glendora, New York.
Fredrick was an active medical medium while in Michigan in the late 1850s and 1860s. In the Spiritual Times ,2 July 1864 in a quote from the Banner of Light, Willis wrote, “We do not need to go back and say how old dogmas dissolve, and how, one by one, the superstitions of the past leave us free and untrammeled to search for great principles, and to aspire after divine truths. They leave us—these errors—naturally, and the benign inspirations of heaven take their place. We no longer stand divorced from the Pternity of God—we dwell in it. And now our hearts open themselves and express their sympathetic oneness with the true, the pure, and the good.”
Frederick and Love lived in New York Coty for a time. While there, they were editors for the publication The Present Age, Devoted to the Spiritual Philosophy, Polite Literature and General Intelligence, and all the Reformatory Movements of the Day. Suffrage for Women Specially Advocated. The weekly publication was available from 1868 until1873.
During the 1870s and 1880s, his lecture topics included: “Woman’s Place in the World of Ideas,” “The Light of the Soul and Jesus of Nazareth,” “The Heaven and Hell of Spiritualism versus those of Theology,” “The Philosophy of Evil,” “The Inner Life,” and “The Growth of the Spirit.” In 1871, the Music Hall Free Spiritual Meeting in Boston, featured his talk about his spiritual experience in Naples and Rome.
His lectures continued in the 1890s in New England and New York state., including Lily Dale and Rochester, New York. He was known as an inspirational healer and speaker. In 1900, he stayed in Rochester, New York, giving a course of parlor lectures on “Metaphysics or the Science of the Human Soul.”
At the time of his death in 1914, Fredrick was living with his daughter and was a member of the Unitarian Church. He had had a summer home in Glendora on Seneca Lake for forty years.
by | Jul 22, 2024 | Karen's Korner
Melvina S. Holt was born in Woodstock, Vermont in 1828 to Dr. Jacob M. and Susan E. Holt who settled in Bridgewater, Vermont. Melvina had one sister, Flora E. Holt Newton (1860-1921). The family apparently took an early interest in Spiritualism. A Spiritualists Memorial to Congress sent in March 1854 to the 33rd Congress stated, “Memorial of N P Tallmadge and others, Citizens of the US praying the appointment of a Scientific Commission to investigate certain physical and mental phenomena of questionable origin and mysterious import that have of late occurred in this country and in Europe.” It was signed by Jacob M. Holt and Susan E. Holt of Bridgewater among hundreds of others.
By 1856, Melvina was listed as a medium in Bridgewater, Vermont as Mrs. M. S. Townsend (formerly Mrs. Newton). She was advertised as giving clairvoyant examinations and sittings for friends in the towns she was visiting. She was also called a trance medium in 1859. Her father was listed as a healer in 1860 and 1861.
Melvina’s marriages are not well documented. In1866, she was called Mrs. M. S. Townsend of Bridgewater, Vermont; in 1868 and 1872 Mrs. M. S. Townsend Hoadley of Vermont; and in 1876 Mrs. M. S. Townsend of Cambridge Port, Massachusetts. The only marriage record found is to farmer Charles N. Wood in 1877. It was his second marriage and her third according to the document They lived in Newton, Massachusetts.
Throughout the late 1870s and 1880s, Melvina spoke to large audiences. From 1879-1887, she was on the Banner of Light’s list for Spiritualist speakers. At the Lake Pleasant Spiritualist camp, she spoke on “The General Features of Spiritualism.” She also participated at the Labor Reform Convention in Boston in 1880.
The Fitchburg Sentinel, 14 April 1882 wrote, “Mrs. Townsend Wood, one of the oldest and best speakers in the field, is to speak for the Leominster Spiritualists….” During the 1880s she was guest speaker at Camp Etna, Onset Bay Camp, and spoke in other New England towns. The titles of her talks included “The Prison, the Gallows and the Philosophy of Charity,” and “The Power of Spirit over Matter.”
She was also a proponent of suffrage and prohibition. In1888 at Onset Bay, “That grand advocate of woman suffrage and prohibition, Mrs. Townsend-Wood, was speaker of the forenoon. Her subject, ‘Temperance, and its relation to Spiritualism,’ was ably handled,” wrote the Golden Gate, 28 July 1888.
Her husband, Charles Wood, died in 1905 and Melvina followed in 1907. In her will she said she would like either to be cremated in Massachusetts or buried in Vermont without clothes so that the clothing did not go to waste. She was cremated in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
by | Jul 15, 2024 | Karen's Korner
Albert E. Tisdale was born about 1851 to Reuben and Jane Tisdale in Essex County, Massachusetts and was one of their five children. By 1863, his mother was a widow in Norwich, Connecticut. Albert entered the Navy when he was only ten years of age by serving as an orderly to Commodore Ringgold on the frigate Sabine. Commodore Ringgold sent Tisdale home before the close of the Civil War to prepare for entrance to the naval academy. It was about this time that Albert began to have problems with his eyesight. In a short time, Tisdale became blind.
In1880, Albert was still living at home with his mother, Jane, and his sister, Emma Bard, in Norwich, Connecticut. His interest in Spiritualism took hold about this time. In New London, The Day, 2 December 1884 published: “Albert E, Tisdale, who had the misfortune to lose his eyesight some 15 years ago, has blossomed out as an inspirational speaker. It is claimed that this spirit of a departed one named Denton controls the medium.”
He became a well-known speaker, attending several Spiritualist camps in New England, including Lake Pleasant. He also lectured throughout Massachusetts, including in Boston and Springfield. In1890 at Temple Heights he sang songs before his lecture and gave readings afterward. He became known as the “Blind Medium of Merrick, Massachusetts.” His lectures included topics such as: “The Human Family Knows No Greater Evil than War,” “The Religion-Builders,” “The Coming Struggle,” “What is the Need of Jealousy among Mediums?” and “The Philosophy of Modern Spiritualism.”
Albert also maintained his interest in the Navy. In the Boston Globe, 16 December 1894 he was listed as speaking before the Farragut Naval Veterans. “The next meeting of the association will take place Wednesday evening, when an interesting lecture will be given by shipmate Albert E, Tisdale, the blind orator, the subject being, “The Cruise of U S Ship Sabine in Search of the Alabama, in the Fall and Winter of 1862-63.”
Albert continued with his speaking engagements for the next two decades. The Banner of Light, 31 July 1897 wrote, “Mr. A. E. Tisdale was the next speaker, and was greeted with great applause. He spoke at length in regard to liberty, of religious shams and of the beauties of religion embodied in Modern Spiritualism; his remarks were received with hearty applause.” He was a featured speaker at Golden Jubilee of Modern Spiritualism in Washington D. C, the same year.
At the1898, Spiritualist camp meeting at Vicksburg he gave an inspirational address. “There never was a grander discourse delivered at this camp than the one furnished by his guides on this occasion.” The Lansing Journal, 14 Feb 1901 printed, “Mr. Tisdale has been totally blind since childhood and is one of the most brilliant, profound and logical speakers on the spiritual platform. His addresses while entranced in connection with his singing and playing, make a most entertaining evening.”
Albert died in Boston in 1906. The Day, 25 August 1906 of New London, wrote, “Albert E. Tisdale, a famous blind lecturer, once a resident of this city, was overcome by the heat in Boston Thursday and died in a few minutes. He had just arrived by steamer from Maine where he had been spending a vacation. Mr. Tisdale was known throughout New England as a lecturer and as the youngest naval veteran of the Civil War.”
