Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity — John Shaqi
Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and HeredityWinship, Albert E. (Albert Edward)
History
Jukes-Edwards: A Study in Education and Heredity
Winship, Albert E. (Albert Edward)
Edwards family; Heredity; Juke family
In the years of aspiration these children were away from all society
life and educational institutions, in the home of a poor missionary
family among Indians when Indian wars were a reality. When Mr. Edwards
accepted gratefully this mission church his oldest child, a daughter,
was twenty-two, his youngest son was less than a year old. All of the
boys and three of the girls were under twelve years of age when they
went to the Indian village, and all but one were under twenty. When
their missionary home was broken up five of them were still under
twenty, so that the children's inheritance was not of wealth, of
literary or scholastic environment, or of cultured or advantageous
society. Everything tends to show how completely Mr. Edwards' sons
and daughters were left to develop and improve their inheritance of
intellectual, moral, and religious aspiration.
In these years Mr. Edwards was writing the works which will make him
famous for centuries. One of the daughters married Rev. Aaron Burr, the
president of Princeton, then a very small institution. Upon the death of
this son-in-law, Mr. Edwards was chosen to succeed him, but while at
Princeton, before he had fairly entered upon his duties at the college,
he died of smallpox. His widowed daughter, who cared for him, died a
few days later leaving two children, and his widow, who came for the
grandchildren, soon followed the husband and daughter to the better
land.
Mr. Edwards died at fifty-six, and his widow a few weeks later. Both
died away from home, for the family was still among the Stockbridge
Indians. The oldest son was but twenty, and there were five children
younger than he. The youngest son was eight and the other only thirteen.
To make the picture more clear it must be understood that to these six
orphans, under twenty-one, there came at the time of their father's and
mother's deaths two little orphans aged four and two respectively, Sarah
Burr and her brother Aaron. Here was a large family from which father
and mother, older sister and brother-in-law had been taken almost at a
single blow, with two extra orphans to care for.
And with all this there was no adequate financial inheritance. The
inventory of Jonathan Edwards' property is interesting. Among the live
stock, which included horses and cows, was a slave upon whom a moderate
value was placed. The slave was named Titus, and he was rated under
"quick stock" and not "live stock," at a value of $150. The silver was
inventoried as a tankard valued at $60, a can and porringer at $47, and
various other articles valued at $85. The chief material legacy was
his library, which was inventoried as consisting of 301 volumes, 536
pamphlets, forty-eight maps, thirty unpublished manuscripts and 1,074
manuscript sermons prepared for the printer. It was valued at $415.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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