Sometimes just a small note can build a connection.

It is interesting how a tangible item can change the picture you carry in your mind of a person.

Theodosia “Dosia” Harris Dickens was my great-grandfather’s second wife. Let me first share what I knew about Dosia until a few months ago, based solely on written records in genealogical databases.

Census records indicate that Dosia was born around 1859 in Warren County, North Carolina, to John Harris and Margaret Lancaster Harris. She had two full siblings and five half-siblings. Dosia married my great-grandfather, Jacob “Jake” Ballard Dickens, on December 18, 1901, about 9 months after my great-grandmother died. It appears this was Dosia’s first and only marriage.

Dosia married into an immediate family. There were four boys, ages 16, 14, 12, and 9, and my grandmother, Lorena, was 6. Dosia and Jake did not have any children. My great-grandfather, Jake, died in 1933. Census records show Dosia living with my grandmother, Lorena, and her family in 1940 in the house where Lorena had grown up. Lorena and my grandfather, Marvin Carter, had three boys, who in 1940 were 14, 12, and 10. My father, Jake, was the oldest. (I can only presume he was named after his grandfather.)

I stumbled upon records at the Halifax County Courthouse showing that Dosia had been in and out of the state hospital since 1915. Descriptions from 1942 align with what we would consider dementia today. Dosia died in June 1943. To date, I have not found her death certificate, so I am unsure whether she died at home, as her obituary reports, or in the state hospital.

These three short paragraphs were all I had to go on for years. I had an image in my mind of a simple woman who married my great-grandfather to care for his children. Given the reports of her hospitalizations and the era, I imagined that Dosia might have been a challenge for her family.

Then one day my aunt asked me if I would like Dosia’s Bible. Yes! was my answer before she even finished the question. Holding the hefty Bible, measuring about 6x9, my hands went right to a well-worn, gripped spot. It may have had engraving on the front cover that, over time, was worn thin by a massaging thumb. Opening the Bible, I found a handwritten note on the second flyleaf page.

Mrs. Dosia Dickens

her Bible

Little Jake

April the 16 1935

read this [ ]

grandmother

The little Jake she referred to must have been my father. It dawned on me that Dosia was who my father considered his grandmother. I think we get so entrenched in our trees that, if we don’t have personal connections, we forget the ties a stepparent or step-grandparent might have with our ancestors. This one (and only) little handwritten note in Dosia’s Bible was like a harness buckle. It snapped her into my mind as part of my father’s life. They lived under the same roof for a period of time. And on April 16, 1935, there must have been a moment shared between my 8-year-old father and his grandmother, worthy of note.

Dosia Dickens makes me smile now. Whether or not she married my great-grandfather to tend to the children will most likely never be known. But I do know she had some sort of relationship with my father and was more than just an independent, dangling box on the family tree.