This is the point to go back one generation in
the Moring family. Grandfather Moring, whose parents I do not
know about for lack of wanting to know at the right time, had
married Jane Jackson, of near Petersburg, Virginia. He lived to
be eighty-seven and she ninety-one or two. My first recollection
of life on this earth is of driving a street car in Petersburg,
Va. We had gone there to visit my great-uncle, Robert Jackson, a
respected citizen of that place.. I was just about three years
old. The horses were tame and the driver let me hold the reins.
The recollection is still vivid. Grandmother used to claim that
she was distantly related to Old Hickory, a point on which I am
more willing to give credit because, while evidently she would
have liked even more to claim kin with that greater Southern
hero, Stonewall Jackson, she could not and did not make any such
claim.
Grandpa Moring had a sister, Eliza ( my mother
was named for her ), who married Matthew Yates, a well-known
Baptist missionary to China who is said to have translated the
Bible "into Chinese."
Grandpa himself was apprenticed and educated
to be a buggy-maker and was long part-owner of a small shop in
Asheboro. After he lost out in business, or was cheated out (to
hear him tell it) by one of his partners, he drove the mail to
High Point or Greensboro and occasionally made a buggy just the
same. We had no railroad until 1889.
None of the Moring name are left in Asheboro,
or anywhere else that I know of ; although the blood flows on
under many names.
One side of what is now the principal business
street of Asheboro, all the way from Fayetteville Street to
Park, is on Grandpa's old home-place, and I used to help him
pick up pine knots for kindling about where the Alexander's now
live. The town of Asheboro has, within my memory, grown from a
population of three hundred and fifty to eight thousand.
My mother had been engaged to a young man of
Montgomery County who died suddenly and left her at loose ends.
She told me once that she never would have
thought of marrying my father, who was twenty-five years her
senior, if Mrs. Jackson-Walker-Moffitt, widow of that
law-partner before-mentioned, and after that widowed by two
other men, had not "put the idea into her head." Mrs.
Walker-Moffitt, as we usually shortened it, had a strong
personality, was a warm friend and admirer of my father, and
continued to have business with him connected with properties
inherited from Governor Worth as long as M.S.R. lived, or nearly
so. I visited her in Richmond, Va., in 1915, and heard from her
much in appreciation of the strong character of Marmaduke
Robins. A sister of hers was mother of Josephus Daniels' wife. I
do not believe my mother ever repented her marriage. But it was
probably one of those marriages of common sense, rather than of
youthful romance. Maybe something like the European type of
marriage.
During the war or in the days not too long
after, my father bought what may have once been the nearest
thing to a real "plantation" very near Asheboro, the old Alfred
H. Marsh place. The land was all worn out by that time. Mother
said that when she came there a row of negro cabins ran down
into the field behind the house. I can well remember, in fact
still fondly recall, two enormous black-heart cherry trees which
she said once stood at the door of some of those cabins. But the
cabins were gone when I came along. The kitchen was separated
from the house by a real flight of steps, and the cook's
quarters were beyond the kitchen. We boys were all born and
raised on this place, almost exactly on the spot where my
brother's house now stands. He replaced the old winged house,
with the two outside stone chimneys and the breezes blowing
under it, some thirty-five years ago. The fifty-three acres that
we had now show a hundred or so modern homes and a church. The
swimming-hole where we and half of old Asheboro learned to swim,
and which the darkeys used to borrow for an occasional
baptizing, is now invisible or lost, plainly the victim of mild
landscaping operations up and down the old branch.
A great-granddaughter of Alfred Marsh is now
Mrs. DeRoulhac Hamilton, whose husband is emeritus professor of
history at the University, and whose portrait I saw presented to
the library there last winter. Mrs. Hamilton and I talk old
Asheboro when we meet.
When my father died in 1905, of cancer
starting in the root of an old tooth, it was suggested by
friends that one of us boys ought to make available a
biographical sketch. They said he had been a stout figure in
Randolph County, was an example of a self-made man; and that
many people would find pleasure and inspiration in his story. At
the time I lacked the inclination or sufficient interest. I had
gone from the University to Harvard, where Horace Williams had
got me a scholarship "to study philosophy and theology." My
father had seen no good to come of that. To him, philosophy was
an awfully vague subject. He wanted me to join him and Henry in
the practice of law. He would not help me, and I had to borrow
some money from Uncle Will Moring. I don't mean that I fail to
see his point, for I do. My own point is simply that I was
wondering too much about my own place in the world, and that my
mind was turned inward too much to be interested in digging up
the past. My brothers had their reasons too, of course. So it
happens that the period when help from his living contemporaries
was available has gone by. The only sketch of his life written
is a sort of memorial in the University Magazine for October,
1905, from the pen of Nathan W. Walker, then a professor at "The
Hill," who had been at one time principal of the Asheboro
Schools. He has a few facts which I did not know.
Mr. Walker notes M.S.R.'s frequent service in
the state legislature, and mentions that he was for a short time
Speaker of. the House in the session of 1862. That was his first
session. In the editorial field, and in addition to service on
the Daily Conservative, of Raleigh, Mr. Walker says that he was
the first editor of The Randolph Regulator, which was founded in
Asheboro in 1876 and which later became The Asheboro Courier. We
may assume that the original name of that paper was not
suggestive in 1876 of medicinal or governmental regulators, but
of the kind led by Herman Husbands in 1771.
Mr. Walker also gives quotations from
editorials in the Courier, W. C. Hammer, editor; and the Raleigh
News and Observer, Josephus Daniels, editor, upon the death of
M.S.R. in 1905.
The Courier said, in part:
"Mr. Robins was the soul of honor, a gentleman
of the highest character and integrity, an able, learned,
painstaking lawyer, whose practice was not only large and
lucrative in this immediate section, but until his health failed
him, in the counties of Moore, Montgomery and Stanly, where for
thirty years he attended the courts as regularly as he did the
courts of his own county.
"He lived through the days of reconstruction
and carpetbaggism, and was merciless in his exposure of wrong
and excoriation of the bad men who at times held the reins of
power. . . . Never did he mince matters, but was plain,
outspoken and fearless.
"Mr. Robins was a man of strong personality
and individuality in character. He lived through troublous
times. He was of strong, honest, sincere convictions, with
strong likes and dislikes, loyal and true to his friends."
The News and Observer said:
"No honester man has lived in North Carolina
than Marmaduke Robins, who died in Asheboro yesterday. He had
lived a long and useful life. As a lawyer of the old school he
had transacted business for many of the Randolph citizens for
half a century. Their confidence in his integrity was perfect.
He was an able lawyer, had mastered the learning of his great
calling, and illustrated its best traditions.
Mr. Robins was old fashioned in his adherence
to the simple virtues, plain living, plain speaking, and direct
manner. He hated shams and indirection and had no use for
shiftiness or for deceit or for extravagance. He never changed
his manner of life, and the new fashions in dress or in opinions
had no effect upon him.
During the administration of Governor Vance he
held a position in the state government and lived in Raleigh.
While in this city he was a diligent student and hard worker. .
. . He wrote much after the war for a conservative paper
published in Raleigh. He wrote and spoke in epigrams and his
logic was faultless.
The memory of Mr. Robins will always remain a
part of the best history of Randolph County. He was in ability,
in simple living, in rugged integrity, in plainness of speech,
in faith in work, hatred of shams and contempt of extravagance,
the best type of the virtues that have characterized the men of
Randolph in all its history."
It does not seem that I want to undertake any
further encomiums upon my father. That is not a son's job.
Perhaps however it will be worth while to speak of his familiar
characteristics and idiosyncrasies, some of which we boys knew
better than anybody.
Central in our whole outlook lies the fact
that we never exactly knew him as an ordinary father, or dad.
Mother made us call him "Papa" and her "Mama," but, I have
always hated that. Marrying at the age he did, he inevitably
seemed more like a grandfather than a father. No doubt we
sometimes mistook for peculiarities what were just signs of his
having passed the meridian. He was through with a lot of kinds
of fun when we came along, such things as going fishing or
playing a little home-baseball. It seemed to us boys that he
read, read, read, all the time he was home. Of an evening he had
his sacred rocking-chair under the hanging lamp, in front of the
fireplace; and there he read until twelve o'clock or later every
night during our earliest years. We were taught to keep still
and to communicate with one another in whispers. He must have
had wonderful eyes, and he came to have "second sight." That is
to say, finally he abandoned the glasses he had been addicted to
all his life and read again with the naked eye. To be sure,
after that he did not read so much.
His library was generally recognized to be
much the best in town. It was loaded with great sets of the
"works" of the founding-fathers: Washington, Adams, Jefferson,
Madison. He read these sets through time and again. I recall how
he would lovingly touch the covers of his copy of "Elliott's
Debates and Madison Papers." There was a stout array of
histories. Religion was well represented and he had those
gigantic sets of the Ante-Nicene, Nicene and Post-Nicene
Christian Fathers, and ploughed through them more than once. I
had the gumption even then to wonder. I do not know that he
never skipped, but I doubt it. He had the full sets of many of
the great novelists: Scott, Thackery, Dickens, George Eliot,
Bulwer-Lytton. I remember his reading the last two sets, which
he came by late in life. But I do not think he re-read stories,
the way I do if I like them. He had a shelf of the Poets which
he got volume by volume and went through methodically. He
especially liked Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queen. He owned
Shakespeare and had a good many quotations in familiar use. The
Brittanica was there. For science, much the weakest field, he
yet. had Darwin's famous works and volumes of Huxley and
Tyndall. The law library was at his office.
He probably read more in the field of religion
and Christian history than in any other except law. In fact he
bought so many religious books that publishers and book-stores
sometimes addressed him as "Reverend" or "D.D." On one of these
occasions I recall his saying: "Faugh, I had rather be called
'dog' than 'Reverend'." My children will think I inherited
my dislike of this title from him. But I venture to think he may
have had the same feeling about it that I always had: that
"reverend" is a good English adjective, and it is a pity to take
it in vain, or to risk doing so. My feeling is that we ought to
wait and see how good and pious (those two words ought to mean
the same thing) a man is, before we hand out the title to him.
In other words, I rather think both my father and I have always
felt that you should not set a man up too high just because of
his profession. I know he was averse to judging people by their
position, or the office they held, or their brass buttons, or by
their piety apart from stout character. This feeling about the
title of "Reverend" may have been a prejudice going back, on the
religious side, to the fact that the Hardshell Baptists, among
whom he grew up, did not have a settled ministry. Or it may have
been partly, as in my case, a kind of individualism which is
resistant to many of the common features which seen to go with
usual forms of religious organization. He was not a good
organization-man, not a wheel-horse.
For many years he taught a men's class in the
Methodist Sunday School. And once, either because we were
misbehaving or because he thought we weren't learning enough, he
took Henry and me into his class. We sat there very silent while
those old men were discussing St. Paul's epistles. I remember
that one Sunday the question was whether God's "foreknowledge"
of everything, including whether we were finally to arrive at
heaven or hell, made Him responsible for where we went. The
class was plainly unwilling to think it did. I do not recall
that the teacher's view stood out in any way. But even then, I
think, it seemed to me that when you add God's supposed
"foreknowledge" to the fact of his creator-ship, to the fact of
his having made even Father Adam the way he was made, the
ordinary pious defense was a bit weak.
His taking us into that valetudinarian Sunday
School classreminds me of his taking us out of day-school once
for a whole year. It was when Henry was getting ready for the
University, and our father felt that the head of the high school
was not the man to give the needed instruction in Latin and
Greek. So he undertook to teach us those two subjects himself.
We read Vergil and started first-year Greek under him. I recall
that he seemed to know the principal parts of every Latin verb
in the deck. On Greek he was a little weaker. But he had taught
both of those subjects in country schools some fifty years
before. And the head of the high school didn't pass his
examination.
There is a qualification to the story of our
father's obsession with reading, at the fireside. In the first
place, as he grew older and towards that period of second-sight,
his' eyes tired more and more easily. And he loved to play
cards, especially Whist, the ancestor of Bridge. And so when we
boys began to get big enough, he taught us to play Whist and
half a dozen other games: Seven-Up, Euchre, California Jack,
High Five, Pedro. This diversion came in the hour after supper,
or when our studying was done and he got tired of reading.
Sometimes one of us was sent for Grandpa Moring, who by this
time lived next-door in a house belonging to our father: that
always meant Seven-Up. To hear Mother tell it, it was the
Methodist Church Discipline, which forbade cards and had
nine-tenths of Asheboro intimidated, which had put her out of
the field before we came into it. However I have always
suspected that the real reason in her case, as in that of so
many others, might have been that she was not so very good at
Whist. For Father took his Whist very seriously, demanding
whole-hearted attention to it. After Duke got big enough, we had
a Whist team in the family all the same. And sometimes, during
Court week, one or more of us even played with the Judge or some
lawyer from away, to help make a quartet.
M.S.R. had many familiar sayings which came
out at the card-table. At Whist, he frequently declared that
there were just two excuses for not returning a partner's lead:
being dead or having none of the suit. When somebody tried to
belittle a mistake, lie would say: "A miss is as good as a.
mile," or "If the dog had not stopped to drink he would have
caught the rabbit." Getting ready to make a Coup, he had a
saying supposed to be ('ruin a "Dutchman" trying to speak
English, which sounded to me like "Ash petterash knot." It was
after I had studied German that it occurred to me the "Dutchman"
was supposed to be giving a rendering of "As better as good."
Oscar Coffin, who got into some of these games
after Henry and I were off to college, and also worked on the
farm at some of those occasional jobs, such as haying, that we
boys were in demand for, recalls a dressing-down he once got for
not coming by at end of day for his wages. We always had a hired
man on the place, Clark Hooker, Tom Sledge, Frank Robbins —
Frank much the longest period. Whoever it was got paid by the
day, and I don't mean the week. M.S.R. had early contracted a
horror of being in debt to any man, and money owing to another
literally burned a hole in his pocket. He would have been the
last man on this planet to sell anything to on the installment
plan. The idea would have given him the horrors. He may have
seen people in debt when he was a boy and reacted violently,
just as many others do to the spectacle of a drunkard in the
family or close around. My brother thinks the reaction was to
the general ruin and bankruptcy which in the South followed the
Civil War.
When he came home from attending Court in some
other county, Father usually brought a bottle of good-smelling
corn whiskey. About as soon as old Frank, our roan horse, was
unhitched from the buggy, Grandpa Moring would be sent for. He
would wind up what he was doing and come at a trot. There would
be drinks on the back porch. Dad took his straight, with water
following. Grandpa wanted a little mint and sugar in his and
called it toddy. I don't think there was ever an occasion of my
witnessing this ritual on which I was not offered a taste.
Father said he didn't want us boys to form any false romantic
notions on the subject. Was this one way of heading off a
"complex" ? His system has worked very well with his particular
three boys, so far as I know.
Annie Moring Robins
1853-1928
However, perhaps I ought to say that Mother
worked on just the opposite system. She used to make scuppernong
wine and blackberry wine; but none of it did we boys get unless
we were sick, and precious little then. I remember sampling the
supplies on the sly a time or two, something I am quite sure I
never did with Father's stores. I don't know whether that was a
difference in the handling of us or an original difference in
the personal awe I felt for my two parents, the one over against
the other. Mother also put up brandy-peaches occasionally, and I
remember expostulating with her when she would get out a
saucer-full of them for Uncle Will Moring but passed me by
entirely. That memory adds a romantic glow to the brandy peaches
I see on the store-shelf today, and maybe it is just as well I
can't afford them. She took the view that such things were for
adults and not for boys. Maybe here was a difference between my
father's Hardshell Baptist upbringing and her Methodist one. Old
Susannah Wesley, John Wesley's mother, and John himself, and the
Methodist discipline, are not exactly democratic in outlook.
Susannah said the first thing to do for a boy was to "break his
will," and John quotes that a time or two in his journals.
Father's uncle, Editor William Swaim, had been
one of the Anti-Bank men in North Carolina during the Jacksonian
era. Banks were not on any sound foundation or well-regulated
system when my father was growing up. Once I saw him buy a farm
(I think the price was just two thousand dollars) and pay for it
entirely in gold coin, bringing tight rolls of it out of the
stout iron safe that stood in the back-room of his office. It
was the most gold I ever saw at one time. All his money went
into poor Randolph farms, and at one time he owned five of
these, let out to tenants. It was a poor way of increasing
money, but to his prejudices it was the safe thing. His friends
have said that if he had turned over some of his fees to Dr.
Worth or another friend, to invest in those Deep River cotton
mills that were coming along, he would have died a rich man.
When he died Asheboro had possessed for some years a bank which
has become known as one of the soundest and most conservative
institutions of the state. It has been under the hands of W. J.
Armfield, Jr., from its very founding to this moment at which I
am writing. But that bank meant little to Marmaduke Robins. He
kept a very small cash account there for convenience but always
insisted upon dealing with Mr. Armfield personally when he went
there to deposit or draw. And when he died, the administrator
found fifteen hundred dollars in gold in his safe.
As just indicated, he died without making a
will. I believe he had told someone that the law would send his
property about where he wanted it to go anyhow. So perhaps that
was not peculiar for a lawyer.
He wore a 7% hat and many times, as you might realize, had
difficulty in getting fitted. As I recall him, he practically
always wore a stiff, high crowned hat, with rounded top or
edges. It was a plug-hat but not quite a "beaver."
Since left-handedness is a distinct piece of inheritance, it may
interest my two "southpaw" sons (John and Ralph), to know that
my father was left-handed. To be sure he had early been
forcefully drilled into using his right hand for writing, and he
kept that up. Apparently this left-handedness has skipped a
generation, unless it be that a certain ambidexterity developed
by my brother Henry, particularly in throwing a baseball, is a
point to the contrary. I believe he thinks he developed that
himself. But not only did it at the time seem to me a thing
impossible to learn; but it now seems that the other boys would
not let you throw the ball so many awkward ways as would have
been necessary for most people to throw it while trying to learn
something so unnatural.
He was generally thought to be homely and very
frequently remarked upon as resembling Abraham Lincoln. He even
got that comment. once behind the Yankee lines when on a trip to
see one of his wounded brothers who, I believe, was captured and
later exchanged. Chin-whiskers without moustache may have had
something to do with the Lincoln suggestion, as general rugged
appearance certainly did. There is a story about his homeliness.
Joshua Bean was another Asheboro lawyer who ran for the
legislature on the Republican ticket as often as my father ran
on the Democratic. At Carthage Court, a man asked how to
recognize Marmaduke Robins, as he wanted him on business. He was
told: "Go into the court-room, pick out the ugliest lawyer in
the bar, and that will be Mr. Robins." The man went and picked
out Josh Bean. Josh was homely enough too. He had to listen on
the stump to that story more than once.
There is one picture in the family album
showing my father wearing a black bow-tie. It may be painted in,
or it may be fruit of one brief moment, perhaps shortly after
marriage, during which my mother got him to wear a necktie. As I
remember him, he always wore a stiff-bosomed white shirt,
without any tie. At least in older age he despised all man-made
fashions, at least all new ones. He was probably the last man in
Asheboro to wear full-length knee-boots underneath his pants.
Besides not being exactly a good
organization-man, he was somewhat prickly in personal
relationships. In the legislature he soon got the name of
"watch-dog of the treasury," a sobriquet they do not hand out to
a fellow who is fully "one of the boys." You have noted that it
was during his very first term that he was Speaker for a while.
In the correspondence he left behind I found years ago a letter
from a Greensboro lawyer and old associate, deeply offended at
my father's reply to his request for support for a judgeship or
for Congress, I forget which. M.S.R. had refused, saying that he
thought. the office ought to seek the man and not the man the
office.
He never joined any church, and he stopped
attending my mother's, and stopped teaching that class in the
Sunday School there, when they posted a list showing how much
each member was expected to contribute for church expenses and
preacher's salary. He got as far as the church-entry that day,
but, upon seeing the notice, turned around and went home
muttering the name of Uncle Joe Betts, and what he was supposed
to pay. Mr. Betts was our chief grave-digger. Father never
personally darkened the door of any church again, though they
buried his body from that one.
He had been a Mason at some early period of
his life, and kept apron and regalia in a drawer; but, except
possibly for funerals, I think never attended a Masonic meeting
after I got big enough to notice such things.
He lived to be seventy-eight. When he died my
brothers and I consulted with our mother about what to put on
his tomb-stone, along with name and dates. We finally hit on the
phrase "integer vitae." That suggested integrity and having the
root of the matter and the deciding principle within yourself.
And I would not change it if it were to do over.
And now to speak a little about my mother.
This is a topic on which I am neither as ready nor as able to
speak as about my father. I stand a little further off from him
both in age and in memory. Mother, who died in 1928, had
outlived him twenty-three years. From her marriage in 1878, she
always made her home on the old Marsh-Robins place in Asheboro,
in later years with Henry and his wife; but she often visited me
in my wanderings She spent a whole year with me in Kingston,
Massachusetts, before I was married. She was at my marriage to
Frances Shippen Lord on June 5, 1917, in old Plymouth. She
visited us several times in Ann Arbor, the last time being the
summer of 1928, the one before my going in the fall into
teaching and before her own death at Christmas-time. Anne and
John may remember her vaguely.
She was one of the most sociable people in the
world, making friends galore wherever she went, and keeping up
with many of them. The presence of people made her gay, excited
her to small-talk. Northern strangers found warmth and Southern
charm in her manners. She was eminently a "good mixer," though
of the gentle as over against the smashing approach. She loved
her friends deeply, and inclined to like and sympathize with
almost everyone. She was a thoughtful person. She taught me
never to say "Nigger." I do think she felt a little bit strange
with every one of us rather silent Robins boys. She often stood
between me and my father though, and I think usually went out of
the room when he had sent me to get a switch for personal
application. Perhaps the others could say the same. She was a
devoted mother and I am not good at expressing feelings in
words. I often catch myself wishing she could be present to help
enjoy something beautiful. That is one way of saying her spirit
is not dead but liveth.
The Asheboro Courier gave her a whole column
on its front page, referring to her as a landmark among
Asheboro's older citizens. It goes on to say "her unusually
active mind and body made her a congenial companion for the
young folks." I want to qualify the first part of that by saying
that she was definitely not physically strong, although she had
the ability to rise to any social excitement or adventure. Her
strength was of the spirit.
The Courier goes on to say that when called
upon in the various clubs of which she was a member, she "could
relate interesting incidents in a most humorous and delightful
manner." Perhaps it seemed so to others. But either the Courier
is adding a little lustre derived from her paternal family, or
else I am being bothered by comparisons. Her brother, Will
Moring, and her sisters, Mag Anderson and Ida Coffin, were all
three famous story-tellers and reconteurs, able not only to see
the humorous side of trifles but to give the most hilarious
account of their minor travels. In comparison at least, my
mother definitely lacked this gift, although she had the sense
of humor. I find that she collected and filed good anecdotes,
just as I do and just as she filed the names of casual
acquaintances from her trips.
This from the Courier is certainly by the hand of an old friend:
"The earliest recollection of Annie Moring was that of the
school-room, the church; and at any public gathering she was the
life of the group. Delightful in personality, pleasing in manner
and cheery in disposition, she scattered sunshine where there
were shadows, . . . . She had the happy faculty of extending
thought and kindness through little things . . . possessed a
gentle spirit and an individual way of doing beautiful things
for her friends and neighbors."
"Her flower-garden, in which she took such a
pride and delight, was a beauty-spot on her street, and in many
yards and gardens of the town are plants that the owners tell
you came from 'Miss Annie's' garden."
Her garden was a nice old-fashioned one, as things went in
Asheboro, and it is much mingled with my earliest thoughts. She
made me draw and tote water for it though, in the summer-time,
until I am afraid it did something adverse to my sentiments
about cultivated gardens. I am all for wild flowers and sights,
where they grow or happen to your surprise. Of course it is nice
to spot some plants around a bit in places where they will do
the work of growing without much help. But if nature and God are
willing to do it all, so much the better. Mother also loved wild
nature more than most people very well can. I shall never forget
her rapture over the New England winter in Kingston — standing
at the window of a morning and clapping her hands like a child
at the world outside, deep snow or ice on pointed firs and
mighty elms, the Christmas chromo come true. In coming to Ann
Arbor of a spring, she would rave about the Judas-trees
(red-bud) along the railroads. Here is something which marks a
bigger agreement, over against the disagreement about flower
gardens. I for one have inherited from some source a love of
wild nature as one of the deepest passions and resources, and I
suspect that it is partly or even largely through her. The poets
I have really loved so far are Wordsworth and Emerson. And if
any of you have the same mystical feeling about unspoiled
forests, or brown leaves on a. hill side; or think a snow-storm
is the best time of all to get out in the woods; or have the
same craving in travel to "see first what the Indians saw": then
you will know what. I am talking about and know where you
probably got some of it.
I give you a few more dates for your record:
My elder brother, Henry Moring Robins, was born on the 19th of
July, 1880; I was born on the 21st of July, 1883 ; our younger
brother, Marmaduke (without the "Swaim," it having previously
been handed to me), was born November 28, 1887, and died in
February, 1953.
In conclusion, I want to say that I am well
aware that my own children have a more distinguished or
well-known ancestry through their mother than through me. But
that record is better preserved, in less danger of being lost
than the one I could give you a little account of, as I have
done. It seems that no family at least, whether the same can be
said of the individual or not, can be anything just of and by
itself, so as to claim all the credit. It sort of seems that my
father needed help from that good Cedar Falls citizen to get him
to Chapel Hill, and that was certainly a turning point in his
life. But every family, in every generation, has to borrow a
whole half of itself from some other family. As already
suggested, it may possibly be that the very best thing we know
about the Robins family, up to the time of my father anyhow, is
that it had the gumption and the persuasiveness to marry twice
into the Swaims. For the Swaims put forth a number of sturdy
sprouts. Our story then is not exactly celebration of a name but
a contribution to knowledge of that "block from which we were
hewn." Whoever you are, I hope you have an ambition of your own.
But if the story above happens to be a part of your ancestral
story, as it is of mine, I assume that none of us want to let
down, any more than we have to, any of the Robinses, the Swaims,
the Morings, the Lords, or the Shippens. And whether any of us
may add a candle-power to the glow of any or all of them is not
for us to say, though the idea of it is a nice one. Amen.
Chapel Hill, N. C. February, 1955.
