A Family Mystery
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

I found this picture in the attic just before Grandma died. She wanted me to bring down some photos of her in her youth, but this one seemed much older. She recognized it immediately.

“That is my grandmother’s brother,” she said. “I know it is hard to believe, but that pretty young thing is a young man.”

I needed to know more. I was deeply fascinated by the image even without hearing about who it was.

“Well, his name was Beverly. I know that sounds like a girl’s name, but back at the beginning of the 20th century it was used exclusively for boys. I think that she carried the same middle name as you – “Bethnel” after the settler ship that brought our family here. And there is clearly a family resemblance.”

Was there? Beverly was skinny like me, but she had that beautiful hair pinned up on her head, which looked that it might fall loose around her shoulders with the slightest shake of her head. What would it be like to have hair like that?

“What happened to her?” I asked. “Did she cut her hair and live out her life as a man?” I could not help but use the feminine pronoun.

“What choice would she have?” said Grandma. “I think that she was only young here, before a beard would appear. Children wore their hair long in those days, while in the care of their mothers, but when the time came it would have to be cut. But he had no sister, so perhaps this was just a flight of fancy – to dress as a girl and pose for a photograph. I just know that this image was treasured. Perhaps he died young?”

“Perhaps he ran away?” I am not sure why I said it. I had an image in my head of Beverly running through a field, hair flying, and screaming out the words “I am free, and I am a woman!” But grandma was right – that might be possible now, but not then.

“Can I hang onto it for a while?” I asked.

“Keep it,” she said. “You know as much as I do, so Beverley is alive in a memory. I have heard it said that people die twice – once when the soul leaves the body, and a second time with the death of the last person who knew them.”

It was an interesting thought, and I suppose it justified Grandma throwing out a lot of photographs that day – photographs of people she didn’t recognize so it seemed nobody would. They are just faded gray images on cardboard with no meaning.

But I wanted to know more about Beverly Bethnel Harvey, more so because I had placed her image on the desk in my room, so I Googled her. There was nothing. I was not surprised.

Still the image seemed to call out to me. I started to wonder about the family likeness thing, and I went to some effort to set up my phone to catch me in an identical pose, with a band around my head and a top thrown together using a sheet. I could see a hint of something, but it seemed that if I was going to perfect the image of me as Beverly then I would have to grow my hair.

Other things intervened but the image stayed on my desk. I remember that my friend Tom visited my room and asked who that was, and I said – “That is an ancestor of mine – Beverly Harvey. Family have said that I look like her. Do you think I do?”

“She is pretty,” said Tom.

I pulled a sheet over my tee-shirt and found that I could pull my longer hair back and up. I said – “What do you think now? Take an image on your phone.”

He did. He said – “Yeah, that’s weird. You look like a Victorian era young lady.” He was smirking. But I saw the image on his phone, and it was weird – I looked just like her. I asked him to send me a copy.

I went back to Google and played around. If she had dropped our surname Harvey then would she keep the other names? The combination of those two seemed uncommon enough.

Actually, there were a lot of Beverlys in old New England, all men, but not many carried the name Bethnel. And there was one person who made me think that I had found my relative. There was a Bethnel Beverly McIntosh, know to everyone as Beth, who would be the right age. Except this person was a married woman. She had married James Coll McIntosh about 5 years after the date on the back of the photograph, and he had been a very successful builder of important buildings in our city. They never had children. They died in the same year of old age.

I found a photo of them. They were old but she still looked good. People look serious in photos of those times, but it was clear to me that they were happy. I could see that it could be her, so I decided that it was. Somehow, she had managed to live a life as a woman, and it had been a fulfilling and happy life. It was an example that could be followed.

After my own surgery I changed my name to Beverly, so we share a name, but my husband Tom and most of our friends, call me Beth.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2023
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