After reading Chairman Joe’s Wannaskan Almanac blog post of Friday, December 13, 2019 about Robinson Crusoe, I remembered a Des Moines Register & Tribune newspaper article of my grandmother, Anna Louise Barnhart, and one of her younger brothers, Edward Barnhart, when they were reunited in Des Moines, IA, after forty-one years apart.
“You’re somebody I used to know,” she had said. “But I can’t recall your name.”
The stranger laughed long and loud. “I’m your brother, Ed,” he said. “Yes, a person does change a lot in forty-one years,” agreed Mrs. Reynolds, of 819 E. Twenty-second Street, and Edward Barnhart of Brooklyn, NY, who saw each other for the first time in that many years.
The reunion ended a search that led Barnhart, his wife and son, from their home in New York to Iowa where they did not even know what town his sister lived.
Starting at Ames, where he had been told she lived, Barnhart by chance found a man who said he knew a Reynolds family at Ankeny. The Reynolds, although they had never lived at Ames, had previously resided at Ankeny and Barnhart quickly was directed to Des Moines.
Long and briskly did the bronzed, lean brother and motherly looking sister talk Monday as they attempted to tell each other of the events of their years apart.
Great was the distance and strange the directions that separated them since Ed, a lad of 14 or 15, left their Cavetown, Maryland, home to make his way in the world. For awhile he worked in a southern mill. Later he drifted to San Francisco where he shipped out on an old three-masted schooner.
In the old sailing vessels, he journeyed to the Philippines and to New Zealand. He served his apprenticeship on the sea which was to be his home for most of his life. By the time he joined the Navy, in which he served 30 yeas, he was a full fledged seaman.
Where the American Navy has seen service, Barnhart has seen service too. Not a day of the world war did he miss (World War I).
He was under Dewey in the Philippines, served Vera Cruz, in Haiti, and gone with the Navy around the world.
He is a holder of a Distinguished Service cross as Chief Gunner’s Mate in the sinking of a submarine off the coast of Ireland during the war.
A treasured possession is a certificate showing he was one of the men to fire salute for the Navy at the opening of the Panama Canal. But while he was on the sea, he had lost contact with his family.
“When my father died, I was in China. When my mother died, I was in the North Seas helping sweep mines. You can’t help much when you’re away like that,” Barnhart explained.
Anna, born in 1872 in Leitersbrg, Maryland, was one of an unusually large family, having 23 brothers and sisters (including Ed). She had married Charles Clinton Reynolds, of Cavetown, Maryland, in 1890. In 1897 they had moved to Ogle County, Illinois; in 1905 they had moved to Polk County, IA. After five years, they moved back to Maryland, but in 1918 they moved back to Iowa, near Elkhart, later moving to Des Moines. She birthed eleven children, one dying in infancy, another at the age of nine.
Gradually, since Edward’s retirement from the Navy a dozen years ago, the family contact has been reestablished. One sister also long unheard from, found him in Brooklyn, with the aid of the government. Following his visit with Anna he was going to Divernon, Illinois where another brother, he hasn’t seen for forty years, lives.
Anna died at the age of sixty-six in May of 1938.Oh heart sore tried, thou hast the best
That heaven itself can give thee rest
How many a poor one’s blessings went
With thee beneath that low green tent
Whose curtains never outward swing
---Whittier, in Snowbound
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