Mother's Painful Secret

The Box of Letters Soon after the death of my mother, Vera Adelma Dillen Pearce in 1980, I began a search for the "truth of her life," in an attempt to discover why she lived her long life with us as a lie. For some time it had become clear to us that the facts she shared of her early life were “not necessarily so.” While providing enough details of her childhood in Maine and stories of relatives in Colorado to satisfy us for a time, for reasons best understood by Vera alone, some of the truths she espoused were bent in the process. My mother, with whom I had a scratchy relationship, was a keeper of secrets; something I only realized once I became a mother and grandmother in my own right. Then in 1995, quite by accident, I inherited a cache of letters written to and from family members and friends from Aroostook County, Maine, covering the period 1842-58 and 1875-81. Preserving these letters was the impetus for this book. The letters, yellowed and creased with age, many not opened since the time of their receipt, were surprisingly legible. The authors of the letters were terrible spellers, and their punctuation was even worse, but in the graceful copperplate and careful scrolls, the stories of their lives unfolded. The letters contain snippets of town gossip, family concerns, assessments of economic conditions, weather reports and plans for the future. The faces peering out of the tintypes and newspaper clippings tucked inside the envelopes soon became as familiar to me as the features of my own immediate family. In transcribing their anguish, hopes, dreams, poetry, sly jokes and heartfelt endearments, I realized that the past is indeed prologue. We have become what we are because of what they accomplished and endured. These folded notes and letters stored forgotten in a wallpaper covered box that had been moved from place to place for decades became the genesis of this project. The missives provided a pretext and a context for assembling family documents, myth, history, legend and lore into a narrative chronicling our immediate Dillen ancestors beginning with their arrival in the New World sometime around 1818. Because I am the last person acquainted with the stories which were passed down to me as a child by now long-deceased family members, I have pushed to transcribe the letters and compile them into this book lest these lives and legends become lost to us. My great-aunt Annie Dillen Hersey, who was born in Houlton, Aroostook County, Maine, in 1859, passed on the stories to me. She heard these accounts from Eliza Dillen, the eldest daughter of immigrants James and Catherine Lindsay Dillen. Annie had lived with Eliza when she came to town. These are tales of our Dillen ancestors and the emotions that fueled their lives. In an attempt in the present to unlock secrets from the past, I have tried to get inside the head of persons long gone and to look out at their world through their eyes. The legends and the times in which they lived can be interpreted, but the real truth can never be known. I have built this saga piece-by-piece from what I believe to be true and from what I have learned during fifteen years of intimate acquaintance with the family letters that have been my primary source. In getting to know these ancestors I have come to love and admire our family heroines and heroes and to realize that all of us who have come since, whether we know it or not, have been made stronger and more self-reliant from this inheritance. This quest has made me realize that the past, like Maine, is really another country. Some of what I have reproduced—the letters and history—are a real place where we can visit and spend time among those who have come before. Some is, of course, conjecture or the best reality that I can put together from the legends and facts as I have come to know them. I feel I have connected with our ancestors and hope that I am able to make them come alive for you and for posterity. Learning about the family who came before excites, amuses and pleases me, as I hope it will you. In addition to focusing on the distant past through these letters (which are reprinted in this book) and an effort to capture some of the genealogy, I have attempted to continue the family story with recollections of my own happy childhood in Maine and World War II Washington, D.C., in the 1930s and ’40s, and my rich life as a mother and educator. In resurrecting the distant past and recalling my own, this further knowledge of our thrilling lineage has completed me to myself. In many ways what I uncovered in these letters confirmed what I already knew, that we are an optimistic, energetic, determined tribe, with especially strong, capable women—our heritage from the howling wilds of Maine—a legacy that helps shape our lives and our future. My appreciation goes out to all my forebears, grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles and to our Maine and Irish ancestors. Now, to share what I know.