Free of threats or a husband’s compulsion

As President elect Joe Biden said a tearful farewell to Delaware and prepare to leave his hometown of Wilmington for the journey to Washington DC, I was reminded of our family’s singular connection to Wilmington.

It seems that my grandfather, Robert Hamilton Macnee bought a property in Wilmington in 1913. 

The property was on W.20th Street, just north-west of N. Harrison St. This is my sketch deduced from the arcane, handwritten notes in the land record.

And here is the house at that address, 803 N 20th Street, Wilmington, Delaware, according to Google Maps.

803 N. 20th Street, Wilmington Delaware today This house was built in 1921. (Google maps, with apologies to current owners.)

I was taken by surprise when I saw these documents, because I understood that my grandfather lived in New Jersey and that my grandmother, Emma, had left her husband there a year or two earlier.  She returned to England with their only child, my father, Douglas, neither of them ever to be in the USA again.  

I have no evidence that my grandfather ever lived there (the house currently on the site was supposedly built in 1921), nor did he possess the property for long, for it was sold in December 1914.  And, though my grandmother’s name was not included when the house was bought, it was when the property was sold.

Emma did not return to the USA, but signed the documents at the US General Consulate in London.  And here is the interesting part of the story, the only reason to bother to share it here.  For the sale document provides the gem for this story.

Emma, referred to in this document as Emmie (!) was taken aside by the US to ask her, in private and part from her husband, if she was signing the documents “willingly and without compunction or threats or fear of her husband’s displeasure”. 

In honor of Joe Biden, his female vice president, and all the other women in this new administration, it pleases me to report that a representative of the United States government , in 1914, would be so solicitous of a woman’s rights to freely own and sell property in full safety.