Hannah
Rebecca (Becky) Rickenbach was born on 21 August 1868 near Tuckerton, the 10th
child of James Rickenbach and Eliza
Hinnershitz. It is evident from the memoir that Becky lived an idyllic
childhood, exploring the canal, hearing stories
of adventures in faraway places from her brothers, and attending school down
the road at the Rickenbach schoolhouse. Clearly
she idolized her father James, the subject of this memoir which Becky wrote at
age 68.
At an impressionable age Becky lost several family members which certainly influenced her future outlook. Her older sister Annie Laura, close in age to Becky, died at home of typhoid fever on a cold winter’s day when Becky was 17. She lost her father prematurely from heart disease when she was 22. Three years later, her brother Ed was struck down by lightning and killed on his canal boat. Within just a few years, her family’s close-knit life along the canal changed irrevocably, as the canal era waned and many of her brothers abandoned their lives there for a better future at the shipyards of Camden, NJ. Her family was breaking apart.
Most families at the end of the 19th century, unlike today, were accustomed to the loss of children or parents. But this combination of events had a particularly hard impact on Becky as she struggled to hold on to the security of her childhood. At 32 years of age Becky became the nanny for her brother Curtin’s two young daughters in Camden after their young mother died. She was hard on the children, and Curtin soon asked her to leave. She returned to her father’s house to live with her mother Eliza, then near 70 years of age and living alone in the now empty house of Becky’s childhood. Becky would remain there caring for her mother until Eliza’s death in 1922. Becky, 54 years old, unmarried and without children of her own, was alone in her childhood home.
At this point, Becky abandoned her life along the canal, packed her things and moved across the country, apparently alone, to Los Angeles, California. For a middle-aged unmarried women in the 1920s, this must have been a radical undertaking. Even more so considering that her goal was (very likely) to join the new Foursquare Gospel Church in Echo Park (near downtown LA), headed by charismatic evangelist Aimee Semper McPherson who at that time was a national celebrity. By the early 1930s, McPherson’s movement was rocked by scandal, and around that time Becky moved back not to Tuckerton, but probably to Camden NJ.
Around this time, at age 68, Becky penned the memoir of her father and her life as a child along the canal. She seemed to be motivated by the realization that she was one of the last of her family still living, her brother Adam having died that same year. Becky had come full circle. At this time my own father and grandparents knew “Aunt Becky”, who my dad described as small and short in size.
Becky died in 1941 (according to my grandmother) at the age of 73. I have no independent confirmation of when and where she died, but she is not buried at Hinnershitz Church with her parents and other family members. I assume that she is buried somewhere in the Camden NJ area.
This photograph is very likely of Becky in the early to mid 1880s, when she was about 12-14 years old.
Photograph courtesy of Colleen Rickenbach Schulze