Grandmother's notebooks yield memoir of early 20th century JP

When Jill Hofstra attended her grandmother's funeral in 1996, she had no plans to write a book, certainly not a family memoir.  A marketing professional in New York City, she wrote exclusively for business and sales. In 2002, Hofstra was given the notebooks and diaries that her grandmother left behind.  Dated 1956-1988, C. Edwina McNeil Connell had written and saved all the raw material for a memoir of her early years spent living in Jamaica Plain.

Edwina is the chronicle that Jill Hofstra has created from those journals.   More than a personal history, it provides a streetscape and a tale of customs as they once existed in Jamaica Plain.  Here's an excerpt:

"There was a funeral held at the Blessed Sacrament Church almost every day.  I would stand at the fence with the other children and watch the hearse, usually black or sometimes white for a child, drawn by black horses with black nets and hanging fringe or white horses with white hangings. Everyone along the street would stand still while the hearse passed.  People made the sign of the cross and the men stood at attention and removed their hats.  The Catholic cemetery was miles away, and it was almost an all-day trip.  If possible, the procession would try to pass by the deceased's home, where it would pause for a few moments in a last farewell."

While never a resident, Hofstra visited her grandmother regularly.  For her, as for many people today, Jamaica Plain is nearly synonymous with Boston.  She grew up hearing the stories about the people, many born in the 19th century, who her grandmother met between 1905 when she was four years old until she was married in 1926.

In her earliest years, Edwina lived on Centre Street.  A busy thoroughfare even then, it was mainly traveled on foot, on horseback or by streetcar.  In the early 1900s very few people owned autos. In one incident, Edwina reported leaving her yard, wandering into the street and being nearly killed by a trolley that stopped just short of running over her.   Serious accidents, loss of limbs, and death by trolley were not uncommon.  It sounds archaic, but is hardly different in its effect than today's auto accidents.   Horses and trolleys have come and gone but Centre Street remains the same.

The family later moved to Paul Gore Street.

Edwina and her mother were Protestants.  In Irish Catholic Jamaica Plain, they were regarded warily. When kindergartner Edwina made friends with Beth Berger, she was told that she ought not befriend a Jew.   Beth Berger was not only looked down upon, she was excluded.  Edwina would not give up her friendship.  Acceptance is still a hallmark of Jamaica Plain's unique culture which serves wider Boston as a model of inclusion and celebrant of differences.

Such are the vignettes Hofstra has resurrected in this memoir of old JP, precise in their detail of exactly how different life was, but remarkable for being timeless in their themes and illustrative of how we got here from there.  Settle down in the cool season ahead with a warm book of how we came to be the community that we are.

The book is available at Jamaicaway Books on Centre Street, at Jamaica Plain Historical Society events and through Amazon.

Edwina

A Memoir of Childhood Through the Eyes of a Woman

By Jill Hofstra

Illustrated. 235 pages. Authorhouse.