Jan 31st 1852
Saturday have been choring about house & mending most
all day. Made a robe for Mitchell Willis child with
Mrs S Ames assistance Edwin & wife here to tea Mrs S
Ames has been here about three hours with her work
Mrs Witherell here awhile this afternoon. Mr Frank
Russell was buried this afternoon. My three sons went
to the funeral. Quite a hard snow storm Mr Ames to Boston
Inclement weather didn’t keep the Ames men from moving around today. Oakes Ames traveled into Boston on business, as he usually did on Saturdays. His sons, Oakes Angier, Oliver (3) and Frank Morton, rode to Easton Center for the funeral of Frank Russell, a 67-year-old blacksmith and veteran of the War of 1812. Russell had died two days earlier from pleurisy, and, despite the “hard snow storm,” he was buried at the Seth Pratt Cemetery with friends and family in attendance. What had been his connection to the Ames’s sons? Had he worked for the shovel company?
Evelina, too, was tending to a death outside the family. She and her sister-in-law, Sarah Lothrop Ames, sewed a burial robe for Luella Willis, the two-year old daughter of Mitchell and Amanda Willis. Like Frank Russell, little Luella would have to be buried in cold ground during snowy weather. Once the services were over, the living would carry on with their chores, their commitments and their lives. Evelina would turn to “mending most all day.”
evelinaames 