She Has Always Exercised and Enjoyed Those Rights
As I said in my last post, my three times great-granduncle Elias Longley and his wife Margaret Vater Longley were idealists. Among Elias’s many publishing ventures was a newspaper, The Type of the Times. Its slogan was “Devoted to all true interests of the human race,” which, as one writer notes, included “women’s rights, as well as abolition, temperance, and even vegetarianism” (Durack 2020). Of these varied interests, the one to which Margaret, in particular, devoted the most time and energy was women’s suffrage.
Fonetic Speliŋ
I’ve written quite a bit already about my Longley relatives, including Thomas, who spoke out against slavery in Kentucky in 1805, and Abner, who joined a utopian socialist community in 1844. I joke sometimes that this branch of my family never met a radical idea they didn’t want to try out, and there’s actually some truth to that. Abner’s sons continued this pattern, becoming journalists, printers, flag and playing card manufacturers, utopian socialists, and in the case of his oldest son Elias Longley, a passionate advocate for phonetic spelling. It is Elias and his wife Margaret Vater Longley about whom I am writing today and in my next post.
A Well-Known Furniture Manufacturer
My mother owned quite a few antiques although she wasn’t really a collector. She only occasionally purchased antiques herself, but she had many objects that she had inherited from family members. When she passed away last year, I went through these items and consigned most of them to an antique store. I ended up keeping one chair, however, after my cats adopted it as their own. As it turns out, those cats have impressively good taste in antique furniture.
Friends of Humanity
Some time ago, I wrote about my five-times great-grandfather Thomas Longley, who moved his family from New York City down the Ohio River to Kentucky in 1788. Thomas was a Baptist. I don’t know if he was raised in the denomination or converted at some point, but I know he attended the First Baptist Church of New York City, where he served as a deacon from 1787 until his departure to Kentucky (Parkinson 1846). Thomas continued to practice his Baptist faith in Kentucky, joining the Mays Lick Baptist Church as one of its earliest members (Goins 1980).