Certain People of Importance (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Certain People of ImportanceThe beginnings of the family in America are lost, unfortunately, in the obscurity that hangs over the old records and the older homestead of a few insignificant New England villages. That there were Crabtrees in America before the war of the Revolution is provable, but it has never been quite easy to connect the Charlestown and the Springfield families of that name with that of one Reuben Crabtree, a wheel-maker of Mendon, Massachusetts, whose marriage to Hannah Pratt of Bridgewater, Connecticut, took place in the year 1760.Of Hannah Pratt we catch occasional glimpses in the mournful biography of her sister, Eliza, whose marriage to a missionary, whose heroic labours in the mission fields of darkest Sara-wan, and whose edifying death, were made the subject matter of a small green cloth-bound volume printed in the year 1791. Eliza, whose life as the fourth wife of an extremely stern and orthodox clergyman was fraught with bodily miseries only partially mitigated by the tremendous spiritual benefits she enjoyed in his company, duly added three languishing babes to his family of thirteen motherless children, before further duly adding her name quietly and meekly to the other names on his family tombstone.But before this, in her occasional letters, she frequently mentions her sister, the wife of Reuben Crabtree, the maker of wheels, who remained quietly in the little, plain-faced house under the magnificent elms behind the forge, and is never addressed by the missionary's wife except in connection with domestic calamities.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.