Wavetops: The Hart of the Matter

Seeking the Wavetop for my Hart family

A year ago, I wrote about my maternal grandmother’s paternal grandmother (one of My Sixteen), Florence Mabel (Hart) Tuttle (1874-1945):

In Search of Lovey Hart

I followed Florence’s ancestry from there through her mother, Harriet Isette (Wells) Hart. Today, I am looking at her paternal ancestry.

Seymour C Hart (1851–1934) was the youngest of four children born to Alexander Hart (1817-1871) and Frances Pond (1822-1866) in Utica, Oneida County, New York. His big brother, Frederick, was nine years older than Seymour, and there is evidence that Frederick worked as a clerk for his father’s company, Hart & Munson’s, which made milling equipment. It stands to reason that Seymour also worked for his father.

detail from the letterhead of a document found on eBay

Their two sisters were Sarah and Florence. After Frances and Alexander died, they lived together in Utica. They were school teachers. Sarah married a surgeon named Edward Mattoon in about 1878; she lived in the home of Edward’s parents while he worked to establish a practice in Denver, Colorado. They had a daughter they named after Sarah’s sister in 1879, and eventually Sarah and little Florence moved to Colorado.

Aunt Florence moved to Milwaukee where she did clerical work until she died in 1888. Her estate amounted to just under $2,000 (about $66,443.16 today) and was divided between her surviving siblings since she never married.

Seymour married his first wife, Hattie Isette Wells (1854–1879), on 25 July 1874 in Clinton, Worcester, Massachusetts. They had their only child, also named Florence, in November of that year (I don’t do the math) but Hattie died in 1879 after suffering from "Ulceration of uterus". Little Florence went to live with her grandmother: Hattie's mother, Sarah (Fletcher) Wells, in Clinton. (Sarah was the wife of Harlow Wells.)

Finding Harlow Wells

There is a bit of a gap in the records, but in 1880, “S.c. Hart” was listed in Orange, Franklin County, Massachusetts, running a sewing machine shop. I like to think that he stayed close to his daughter as she grew up.

By the Numbers

I don’t like to sound judgmental about the choices people made, but there are some numbers in this story that will raise some eyebrows, and it would be irresponsible to ignore them.

First, as I mentioned, Florence Mabel was born only about four months after Seymour and Hattie were married. Considering how little time Seymour and Hattie would have together, it feels cruel to imply they should have waited to begin their life together.

Seymour remarried when Florence was 15. He married Zella Jane Bastedo (1872–1951) on 28 Mar 1890 in Bloomingdale, Passaic, New Jersey. Exactly one year later, Florence married my 2nd-great grandfather, John Jackson Tuttle, on 28 May 1891 in Succasunna, Morris, New Jersey.

Sixteen does seem to me to be a bit young for marriage, but at least her husband was 18. In contrast, Zella, Florence’s new mother-in-law, was only 18 herself. That means that Seymour’s second wife was only two years old when he married his first wife.

But this fun fact is a little less cringeworthy: Seymour and Zella’s son, Charles Seymour Hart, was born on 12 Dec 1892, seventeen days after his nephew (my great-grandfather Alfred Tuttle) was born. Both boys were born in Rockaway Township, Morris County, New Jersey, which suggests that Zella and Florence must have gone through their first pregnancies together. I’d like to think that they might have been close and supported each other.

Seymour and Zella also had a daughter, Harriet, born 16 Nov 1906. That was eleven months after Florence had her seventh child, John Samuel Tuttle. Florence would go on to have twelve children, her youngest being Ethel May, born in 1915.

A Kind of Epilogue

The Hart and Tuttle families had moved to Newark by 1910. I like to think Seymour enjoyed plenty of time with his two children and their dozen neices and nephews. He was the only one of his siblings alive by then.

His brother, Frederick, had two children: Charles B. Hart, born in 1869; and Louisa B (Hart) Trembley (1875–1951). I don’t know what happened to Charles after 1875, when his family lived in Utica with Frederick’s in-laws, Dan and Harriet Buckingham. Frederick died in Saranac Lake, New York, in 1909, where the Trembleys lived.

Their sister, Sarah Mattoon, had died in 1900. Her daughter, Florence Mattoon, stayed with her father until his death in Oklahoma in 1939. As of 1950, she was living in the Central State Hospital in Cleveland County, Oklahoma. She was listed as “unable to work” and had never married.

Seymour died in 1934 at 83 years of age.