Thanksgiving

I’ve always enjoyed Thanksgiving. The food, family, laughter, wine glasses clinking. During a recent genealogy search, it just got real.

Guess what I found?

I found Sarah Josepha Buell Hale.

Sarah is my great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s great granddaughter on another line. In a nutshell, she is my distant cousin.

The fact that she wrote the words to Mary Had a Little Lamb tickled me.

Sarah Josepha Buell Hale

Do you see any resemblance?

Sarah is known as one of the first women novelist in America.

This amazing woman was not just a writer. She was an editor, and publisher. Sarah, a widow, published dozens of books of various genres in order to support her five children.

Her poems made me pause and reflect on life. She edited for two magazines, Ladies’ Magazine and Godey’s Lady’s Book, for nearly forty years.

I hope I’m writing that long.

She utilized her writing skills and advocated for higher women’s education. She was so well respected in this field that she was awarded a medal from Baltimore Female College “for distinguished services in the cause of female education”. You go girl!

What does all this have to do with Thanksgiving? I’m getting there, hold your horses.

Check out this letter that Sarah wrote to President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 in the hopes of getting Thanksgiving to become a National Holiday.

Click here to read a typed version of Sarah’s letter.

Her quest began in 1846 with letters mailed to five different presidents. She hit the jackpot with Abraham Lincoln and it became a National Holiday in 1863.

Thank you Sarah for the giblets and gravy!

I couldn’t even begin to tell you all the influential things she did for women to pave our way for higher education, opening doors to the work force, and respect. Read up on her and learn a bit of history and how Thanksgiving came to be our third National Holiday observed in the United States.

Zelle