Oct.6th — Went to SS. but there was none on account of rain. Went to Chilli. in afternoon to Uncle Edd’s & brought Mary home. She & I went to BYPU meeting at Utica at 7 P.M. I led the meeting. After meeting I took Mary to Mrs Lidy’s to stay this week & make her new (W) dress.
Jesse is so modest and discreet even in his own diary that he can’t write out wedding dress. As their daughter Jessie wrote in 1978, her mother Mary worked for a lady who did sewing near the Chillicothe Business College. With Mary’s own earned money, she “bought some sky-blue silk & lace for a front yoke & collar that went clear up on [the] neck with staves to hold it up. Then she had medium blue ribbon ruffled around [the] yoke.”
Mrs. Lidy shows up in the 1900 federal census as living in Saint Joseph, Missouri. She and all of her family members are hard to find in any other census listing. According to the 1900 census, her husband Robert was born in Maine, then moved to Iowa where he met and married Anna, and they had some babies in Iowa, another in Nebraska, and then had her last ones in Missouri starting in 1881. Robert reports that he is a carpenter, and Anna is a dressmaker. The oldest children are painters and laborers.
Like other people in this diary, especially the non-farmers and renting sharecroppers, it is possible that the Lidy family reported living in one location during the 1900 census and then moved. While Jesse could have put Mary unattended on a train to Saint Joseph after 8:00 p.m. on a Sunday night, that seems unlikely. It’s also unlikely that he drove her by horse and buggy all the way to Saint Joe at night. What if the Lidys lived in Chillicothe, and what if Mrs. Lidy has been the lady Mary has worked for in the last year? As always, anyone with information is welcome to comment or send us an email!
