Who they are. Edward Alfred Henry Schmidt and Mary Catherine Dudley, married at York in 1861 — the couple everyone at this reunion descends from. Mary was John Dudley and Lydia Jane Voudy's eldest daughter.
Where. Kittery Point, on the road up from the Navy Yard.
He has a page of his own on this site — the London boy, the false name, the Dismal Swamp, the asylum. This one is about the marriage, and about her.
Because the striking thing about Mary Catherine Dudley is not that she married a man with a hard war behind him. It is that she was twenty-one when she married him and seventy-nine when she died, and the record has her doing something in nearly every decade in between.
Mary Catherine Dudley was born on 19 July 1840 — at Boston.
We know the day because her own death certificate, eighty years later, gives her age to the day: seventy-nine years, seven months and twenty-three days before 13 March 1920, which works back to 19 July 1840 exactly. The same certificate names her parents and, unusually, gives their birthplaces: John Dudley, born York, Maine and Lydia J. Voudy, born York, Maine.
And her parents had married thirty-two days earlier.
The York town book records it: "Mr. John Dudley a resident in York and Miss Lydia Jane Voudy of York intend marriage. Entered June 3d. 1840. Certificate issued June 17, 1840."
Certificate 17 June. Mary born 19 July. Lydia was at full term when she married, and the child was born in Boston rather than in either of their home towns.
⚑ That is not a scandal to be tidied away — it is the most human thing this project holds about those two, and it explains an episode nobody in the family remembered: a hurried wedding at York, and a birth in a city where nobody knew them.
By 1860 they were home. The census of York Village that year holds the whole household: John Dudley, Lydia J., and six children — Mary the eldest, then John W., Ann S., Florence H., Edward K. and George W.
Edward Schmidt came ashore from the U.S.S. Sabine on 12 July 1861, a discharged sailor with a wrecked right hand.
Ten days later he bought a house — sixty-six rods at Kittery on the road from the Navy Yard, five hundred dollars, from Remick.
Five weeks after that, on 28 August 1861, he married her. A civil ceremony at York before Washington Junkins, Justice of the Peace, who was also the town clerk and attested his own ceremony. She was twenty-one. He was twenty-seven and had been a civilian for six weeks.
⚑ And then he left. On 5 April 1862 he re-enlisted, under his own name this time, and went back into the war. Their marriage was seven months old.
He came back in stages — a gunshot wound in September 1862, a fever in April 1863, and in the autumn of 1864 a hospital ticket that said mania and three weeks in the Government Hospital for the Insane at Washington. The Navy revoked his officer's appointment by letter addressed to him at the asylum.
Mary was twenty-four.
Five children came. Adelaide was the eldest, born about 1862 or 1863 — she gave her own age under oath fifty years later. William Edward, the youngest, was born on 26 September 1871. Between them came Lottie and Jennie, and a boy, Otto D., named for Edward's own father, who died in infancy and was buried at Kittery. (Those middle dates come from the family's compiled record rather than from a document, and this project treats that as reference, not evidence.) When the court settled the estate in 1884 it named four heirs, which is how we know the fifth had not survived. Edward worked as a clerk on the Navy Yard, then as a ship keeper, then as a teacher — every job a job that did not need two hands.
And there is one description of what those years were like inside the house. It comes from Adelaide, the eldest daughter, swearing an affidavit in 1912 to support her mother's pension claim:
For the remainder of his life he had severe attacks with his head at intervals ranging from one to three months. At these times he suffered intense pain and his conduct was peculiar and violent.*
⚠ That is family testimony given in support of a claim, by a woman who wanted the claim allowed, forty-eight years after the events. It is not a medical record and this project does not treat it as one. But it is the only account anybody left of the household, and it is consistent with everything the Navy's own papers say. Every one to three months, for seventeen years, Mary managed it.
On the morning of 28 October 1880 a house at Kittery burned to the ground. Three newspapers carried it. The Boston Traveler:
THE DWELLING HOUSE AT KITTERY, OWNED BY LYDIA J. DUDLEY, together with a portion of the contents, was burned out this morning. Loss about $1500; partially insured. Cause, defective chimney.**
The house was Mary's mother's — and all three papers name Lydia as the owner, with no husband mentioned.
Nine months later, on 17 July 1881, Edward died. He had sworn a pension increase at Lowell five weeks before; the claim was never decided.
She was forty-one, with four surviving children, in a house on the Navy Yard road worth four hundred and fifty dollars.
In December 1881 the Probate Court appointed her administratrix of her husband's estate. She took the oath to the inventory on 7 April 1882 and signed it Mary C. Schmidt.
On 4 March 1882 — a month before that signature — she had married again.
Two independent originals record it: the state's card and the town of Portsmouth's own register. "John A. Tucker, 32, labourer, 2nd, York, Me. — Mary C. Schmidt, Portsmouth, 38, 2nd, Boston, Mass. — John H. + Lydia J. Dudley." Both second marriages. He was thirty-two; she was forty-one, though the clerk wrote thirty-eight.
(The probate file alone would put the wedding later, because she went on signing under the name she had been appointed in. The marriage registers are the better evidence and they are unambiguous.)
On 5 December 1882 she gave up the administration, in a petition that explains itself in one clause:
The undersigned who was appointed Administratrix of the Estate of Edward H. Schmidt… and being named in said appointment Mary C. Schmidt, widow… and having since said appointment married, hereby respectfully resigns said trust. — Mrs M. C. Tucker.**
The following spring the new administrator sold the Kittery house to another widow for four hundred and fifty dollars, and in September 1884 the court divided what was left — two hundred and forty-nine dollars and seventy-four cents, less twelve for expenses — four ways among her children.
In May 1912, aged seventy-one, Mary swore a declaration for a widow's pension on the strength of Edward's naval service. Adelaide swore the affidavit about the sunstroke and the head attacks to support it. The Bureau of Navigation wrote back; the papers went round the Pension Office.
It was rejected in June 1912.
The arithmetic of the whole business is in one line of a form filed in 1885, when the Boston agency struck Edward off the rolls for failing to claim his pension for three years — not knowing he had been dead for three and a half. His last payment had run out forty-three days before he died. The eight dollars and forty cents owed for those days was never paid to anyone. The Commissioner confirmed the figure to Mary in 1912, in the course of turning her down.
She died at five o'clock in the morning on 13 March 1920.
The informant on the certificate is Adelaide Eleanor Wayland — her eldest daughter, giving the information at her mother's own address. Adelaide had spent her married life in the American west; her husband had died at St Joseph, Missouri, four years earlier. She had come back east, and she was there at the end.
Mary was buried at Kittery on 16 March 1920, three days later, in the ground where Edward had lain since 1881 under a stone that reads E. H., Master's Mate, U.S.N.
Born in Boston in 1840. Buried at Kittery in 1920. Between those two facts: one war, five children, a burned house, a widowhood at forty-one, a second marriage, an estate settled down to the half-cent, a pension refused, and a daughter who came two thousand miles back to be in the room.
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