Ann Black Bell (1875-1954)
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction.
James 1:27
The second oldest of eight children, Ann Black Bell was named for her father Julius’ maternal grandmother Ann Black (Bythewood) (1769-1846). In a period of about three years Annie’s father, elder sister Margaret, and mother Elizabeth Jane all passed away, the first two (and possibly all three) in the family’s home on Macon St. in Savannah, Georgia after extended illnesses. Annie was not yet 25 years-old.
Teacher, Caregiver, Companion
As the oldest healthy sibling, Annie would have at a minimum assisted at the sick beds, while working full time as a Catholic school teacher to help provide for the household. When her only sister Mary Agnes married shortly afterward, it left Annie as surrogate mother to her youngest brothers Percy and Charles, then ages twelve and six. When her brothers John and then Joseph married and left the household, it was Annie who helped care for her orphaned brother Charles, who contracted the measles and died at age ten. Since their mother’s elderly maternal aunt Carrie Arden (1834-1912) still lived with the family, Annie’s life trajectory seemed set. She worked during the day for fifty-plus years, including at least thirty as a teacher, and spent her evenings as caregiver and companion to three different women for a period of almost 50 years. Though each woman had some family connection, only the first, her great aunt Carrie, was related by blood, though even that connection was somewhat tenuous, Carrie being the spinster sister of Annie’s grandmother Lydia Arden Catherwood (1828-1882)
It is a remarkable and sacrificial love that extends to acting (we would assume) as unpaid companion to women Annie did not even know until her siblings got married. After Carrie died, it wasn’t long before her brother Joseph’s widowed mother-in-law Emma Wideman Barnard (1861-1928) moved in to share the Macon St. home. It is curious and telling that Emma did not live with Joseph’s family on Anderson Street. A few years afterward Annie moved in with Frances “Lizzie” McLaughlin Rebarer, the widowed sister of Mary Agnes’ husband John McLaughlin Jr. Because Lizzie lived into her 90s, Annie served as her roommate, companion, and caregiver for more than twenty years.
Aunt Nan
Because of her close connection to the family, the McLaughlin children and grandchildren saw a good deal of Annie, whom they called Aunt Nan. The only relatively clear photo we have thus far found shows 30-something Aunt Nan at the beach with her sister and brother-in-law and their children. It should not be surprising that Annie is smiling, and holding her newborn niece.
Lizzie Rebarer died sometime after 1946, by which time Annie herself was in her 70s. Sadly, Annie reportedly had a nervous breakdown after Aunt Lizzie’s death, and she was admitted to the state mental hospital in Milledgeville, about 170 miles northwest of Savannah. Her young niece Mary Charles McLaughlin Boniface remembers visiting her there, and that her Aunt Nan seemed very withdrawn. There she died in 1954. It would be comforting to think that Ann Black Bell received many such visitors, and that she therefore experienced a small taste of the remarkable and sacrificial love that she doled out so willingly to others in her lifetime.
Adapted from A String of Bells: Stories of a Southern Family © 2020 by Nick J. Guevara, Jr.
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