Canter Bridge

My distant relatives Johannes and Anna Maria Weaver (Weber) Hoy lived to the ripe old age of 78 and 76. After a Sunday afternoon drive through the greening fields and mountains of Lykens Valley in a luxuriant Pennsylvania Springtime, it is easy to imagine Johannes and Anna breathing the fresh air and working the rich soil of the place. Life might have seemed inevitable.

Yet death stalked this unfortunate couple.

Prolific though they were, life seems to have been fated against their desire to raise children to the healthy adult strength that came naturally to them.

It’s in the numbers recorded without comment in Eva Hoy Haelen’s lovingly researched work, Descendants of Bernhard Hoy (1743-circa 1810).

The family began well enough, by appearances. John (1838) and Maria (1841) came not three years apart. We know nothing of their lifespan. It might have been long.

Then came a third child’s early death. Samuel expired at just 1 month and 23 days. One wonders how the loss affected the couple, already in their 30s when Samuel was snatched from them. Did they foresee their grief as a foretaste, predictor of a fragility alien to their own strong frames?

Jeremiah came fourth. We do not know how long he lingered.

Then, Frank, buried after a year, seven months, and 20 days of life, no longer an infant yet not quite a toddler.

Elizabeth made it almost to her fortuitous sixteenth birthday, but was taken before that date.

Nathaniel. We know only a birth date.

Hannah was only nine when she was lowered into the earth in the Methodist graveyard of Halifax, six miles away, the second cemetery whose soil received Johannes’ and Anna’s offspring, hopes, tears.

Benjamin survived twenty winters and sired a daughter, perhaps a first grandchild for Johannes and Anna. Yet Annie was born sixty days after her father’s death. He never knew her.

Finally, twins came at the end of Johannes’ and Anna’s fruitful years, a bountiful gift in their mother’s forty-second year. Both celebrated thirteen birthdays. Sarah died on her special day, when candles ought to have been lit, gifts given, songs sung. Rebecca followed eight days later.

Johannes and Anna Maria died seven months apart in 1894. Johannes went first. Anna, having wept so often with Johannes—or without him, we’ll never know—might have found life in his absence unthinkable. She hurried to meet him and, perhaps, the children whom she couldn’t coax to live when death was so strong.