She was, for her day, a proper “buff,” enjoying research, an inclination that made her perfectly suited to become the island’s foremost genealogist.īorn April 9, 1802, Eliza Starbuck was the third of ten children born to Joseph and Sally Gardner Starbuck, three of whom “died young.” Joseph first met Sally Gardner while running an errand to her home when they were both fifteen. She was a self-taught botanist and entomologist, so respected in those fields that her obituary says she was “justly to be considered an authority for the rising generation.” And this interest would also creep into her genealogical record, as in the notation that an island man died “from a spider.” Her love of natural history, including all aspects of agriculture, was matched only by her love of history. In fact, Eliza Barney was a wife, a mother, an ardent Quaker with foresighted beliefs in women’s rights, temperance, and abolition. But who was she? Was she a lonely Quaker spinster with nothing else to occupy her days? Or the town “registrar”? Or someone who was fulfilling someone else’s mandate? Or was she a widow with intellectual vigor and time on her hands? Geoffrey and Elizabeth Thayer Verney FellowshipĮliza Barney filled volume after volume with a neat hand and assiduous accuracy, documenting the family trees of islanders from the first Proprietors through their global offspring late into the 1800s. Private Events Make your Event Historic!.
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