Seems like yesterday.

One of the last daugthers of a Civil War veteran died recently.

That sentence gives me pause. It called to mind the line in Faulkner's Requiem For a Nun: "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." A while back Waldo noted how, while time recedes linearly, outcroppings of the past reach far into the future: President John Tyler was born in 1790, for example. One of his children lived until 1948.

SC's best blogger, Cotton Boll Conspiracy, has the story of the hard life that woman lived, triumphing over the odds to reach such a great age. As with everything posted there, it's a fine read. He notes:

Children grew up without fathers and often ended up being shuttled off to relatives, with siblings sometimes split up, or even becoming wards or the state – if one could call what passed for social services at that time being a ward of the state.

Even more than half a century after the war, when Beulah Marie Baggett was born, one didn’t need to have a 70-year-old father to run a very real risk of ending up an orphan in the rural South.

Disease claimed what today would be an unimaginable number of individuals, young and old. Health care was non-existent in many parts of the region, and education often ended after just a few years, leaving residents with little except brawn and tenacity to scratch out a living.

The psychological toll of losing a parent or both parents, or living a hardscrabble life and of seeing loved ones fall victim to illness at a young age must have been overwhelming for many.

But none of that appeared in the Morning News’ story. Instead, readers got a lighthearted article about how Beulah Marie Baggett Mims’ life was little more than a link to the Civil War through her father.

There was nothing about the reality of growing up without a dad, apparently being given up for adoption by her mother, and likely having to scrape by as a teenage orphan during the Great Depression.

While Beulah’s story is one that was repeated countless times before and after the War Between the States, it is one that is relatively rare today.

That is no small blessing, and something to consider the next time someone scorns our social services safety net as nothing more than a free ride for the indolent.