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Family tree▼ Facts and Events
Children
Story in NY Times about Victor and Mary: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/travel/escapes/03Oneida.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
- Both of my great-great-aunts participated in the eugenics experiment. In 1873, Emma gave birth to a son, but Mary’s two pregnancies, in 1873 and 1877, ended with stillbirths. In 1877, the stirpiculture committee refused Mary’s request to have a child with an Oneidan named Victor Hawley and insisted she mate with a man of their choosing. After her second stillbirth, the committee told Mary she would not be allowed to try again. Within months, Mary Jones and Victor Hawley left the Oneida Community to marry, presaging what was to come. Mary Jones and Victor Hawley eventually had five children and joined about 30 other disgruntled Oneidans who moved west to Orange County, Calif. Widowed after 15 years of marriage, Mary slipped into poverty, living in a barn in Los Angeles where relatives recalled her as “quarrelsome” and “tough” before her death at the age of 64.
Some facts from the story:
- Mary: b. abt 1841, from Baldwinsville, NY
- abt 1857-59, Mary, her older sister Emma, and her father William joined the Oneida Community (left mother and other siblings behind)
- abt 1878, Mary and Victor left Oneida to marry when their union was forbidden by Noyes and the community
- they had five children and joined a group of disgruntled ex-Oneidans in Orange Co, Calif.
- Victor died abt 1893
- Mary slipped into poverty, lived in a barn in LA, died abt 1905.
Another story in LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-26-me-27339-story.html ("Diary Offers a Peek Into Communal Society : History: Recently opened archives provide material for books on the Oneida Community of Christian Perfectionists, a 19th-Century experiment in group living, socialist industry and idiosyncratic sex.", 26 Feb 1994)
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