Ada and Monmouth College

One mystery of Ada Rippey's life is how and why she attended Monmouth College.  It's reasonable enough that she attended the Geneseo Normal School which was about 3.7 miles away from her parents home, so presumably she lived at home.

But after Geneseo she went to Monmouth, Illinois to attend the college there.  That's about 800 miles away. Monmouth was Presbyterian and an early co-ed college.  But there were closer alternatives: Elmira College which her daughter Helen would attend, and Cornell, which two grandchildren would attend. Elmira, at least, was both associated with the Presbyterian church and only for women. But it seems to have had some controversies in the 1870's which might have told against it.  My guess is that one or more graduates of Monmouth College were involved in the founding or running of Geneseo, and recommended Ada to the college and the college to Ada.

One excerpt from the Monmouth College history:

"Greek Life firsts
In the college’s early years, college women enjoyed equal footing with their male counterparts — unusual for that time. This sense of equality helped inspire the birth of the sorority movement at Monmouth. When veterans returning to the college from the Civil War decided to form fraternities, a group of women was determined not to be outdone. In 1867 they established the first fraternity for women, known today as Pi Beta Phi. Three years later, another famous women’s fraternity, Kappa Kappa Gamma, was founded at Monmouth.

Typing Love Letters

"After their invention in the 1860s, typewriters quickly became indispensable tools for practically all writing other than personal correspondence."  That's from wikipedia.

Shows how much they know.  Among the family heirlooms my sister had were some love letters from my grandfather to my grandmother Ada, typed in 1884.

Ada Rippey's Schooling

Jean points out Ada Rippey graduated from Geneseo, before moving on to Monmouth.  This link is to the act of the legislature changing the name from the Wadsworth Normal and Training School to Geneseo Normal and Training School in 1871.  William J. Milne was the head of the college during Ada's time, a Presbyterian elder in Geneseo who had a Ph.D by 1874.

Updates of Harshaw Family Tree

I've been adding to the Harshaw Family Tree on ancestry.com, picking up collateral lines, like Ralph Gold's ancestors (old New Englanders, perhaps even with a poor relation of the Brown Brothers of Providence, RI (or maybe just run of the mill Browns), Goulds, Lovejoys, and what all.

A couple of tidbits--Ada went back to her mother to have her first child--Helen was born in Cuylersville. On my mothers side I've about filled in all the first cousins, to the extent I can.

Of course, when I say "filled in", I don't necessarily mean anything more than hitting the census records and maybe the SSDI death index.