THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 27, 1994 TAG: 9411250401
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SARAH MISKIN, Staff writer
LENGTH: Long : 127 lines
IMAGINE A real-life game of Clue that lasts 20 years. Only in this game, you're not trying to solve a murder but to discover the identity of a person whose personal diary of a journey through England in 1794 you have found in an attic.
You write dozens of letters, make dozens of phone calls, spend days in libraries and scour tombstones in cemeteries. You also visit the places mentioned in the diary, trying to find out about the author, who has captured your interest with his tales of touring and dining with society notables.
For 20 years, Aileen Sutherland Collins has been involved in her own game of Clue. Her version ends this month with a book about the life of John Aspinwall, who turned out to be the great-grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Collins' search began on a rainy summer day in 1973. While her two young children were napping, she went up to the attic of her parents' home to browse through her father's boxes of books, as she had done as a child.
In a box of crumbling tomes, she found a brown, leather-covered travel diary with ``Mr John Aspinwall, November 21, 1794'' handwritten in spidery lettering on the first page.
Her father, a minister, did not know who Aspinwall was or how the book had arrived in the attic. He speculated that it had been among cartons of books he had received from the family of another minister who had recently died.
Collins made a couple of minor checks into Aspinwall but found little apart from a listing in the Dictionary of American Biographers, which said he was the father of someone important.
Two years later, having followed ``a series of interesting little leads,'' she discovered he was the great-grandfather of FDR.
One lead was that the Aspinwalls had been merchants in New York. Collins was living in Princeton, N.J., at the time, so she looked in the university library's copy of ``The Old Merchants of New York City'' and found that a daughter of John Aspinwall, Mary Rebecca Aspinwall, had married a Dr. Isaac Roosevelt in 1827.
The next day, she returned to the library and searched all the listings for Roosevelt, finally discovering a small reference mentioning John Aspinwall as FDR's great-grandfather. On further investigation, she found Mary and Isaac's union had produced a son, James Roosevelt, whose second marriage, to Sara Delano Roosevelt, had produced FDR.
Collins continued her search in the Roosevelt library in Hyde Park, N.Y., but found little mention of the Aspinwalls.
By this time, she was hooked on the mystery and was not about to give up on finding out more about the diary's author.
``Anyone who has been involved in genealogy understands that, like a detective story, you get hooked on staying in it until you have found out everything. You get a lead and stick with it,'' Collins said.
For the 53-year-old Collins, who majored in history at Old Dominion University, the young Aspinwall provided a fascinating glimpse of the Britain of King George III in the years of the Napoleonic wars.
He describes in detail his voyage to England in 1794, during which he endured wild seas and a threat of capture by a French warship. Once in London, he tells of dining with Chief Justice John Jay, who was at that time negotiating the Jay Treaty, which aimed to resolve disputes between the United States and Great Britain after the end of the Revolutionary War.
Collins says her main regret about the diary is that Aspinwall does not say what was discussed during those dinners.
``This is frustrating, but I have to remember that this is the travel diary of a 20-year-old man, and this was not important to him,'' she said. ``He was more interested in girls and how low their sashes were.''
Aspinwall describes attending major productions of opera and the theater, traveling by stagecoach across southern England and through the Midlands, and sailing north to Scotland. In describing his travels, he states frankly what he thought of the women he saw (``No handsome girls at the Play.'') and how much of their ``female charms'' were on display. (``. . . the ladies many of them very handsome and all dress'd very fashionable, having their bosoms quite expos'd, the handkerchief being open down to the Sash.'')
He also describes the high bridges, canal system and new manufacturing processes of the Industrial Revolution, and he records seeing child labor, about which he was apparently untroubled, remarking only on how quick the children were in their work.
In trying to find out as much as possible about Aspinwall, Collins wrote to every place he mentioned in his diary.
Every new clue she uncovered confirmed the diary's entries and made her more determined to continue.
``Every time I came across a dead end, I would lie in bed and wonder how I could come around it. I kept trying to think of all the ways of breaking through and unlocking these secrets of history.''
The search became a family project. Her husband, Samuel, a stockbroker, was given ``little assignments'' following leads whenever he went on a business trip.
Collins says that when her children, Kevin and Kimberley, were growing up, they thought Aspinwall was a member of their own family.
``My children thought he was our ancestor because we would spend so much time scrambling around cemeteries looking for gravestones and information,'' she said.
Two decades later, Collins has formed a publishing company, Parsons Press, to publish her book on Aspinwall. It covers 300 years of the family's history and includes a reproduction of the diary.
``It was the only way this piece of information could be published,'' Collins said. ``The scholarly publishers told me it was too popular, and the popular publishers told me it was too scholarly. My husband was surprised when I struck out and undertook the marketing of it, but when I have poured out this much time and energy, I want other people to see what I have found out.''
She admits that Aspinwall's descendants, some of whom live in Hampton Roads, probably think her determination in researching the diary a little strange, but she says she found it a ``wonderful experience of creativity.''
``This 21-year project has given me great satisfaction because of getting to know the family,'' Collins said. ``I hold them in very high esteem: they were an admirable, remarkable group of people. Instead of finding a reprobate, everything I found added to my esteem for them.''
Collins says it is probably risky putting money into publishing the book, but she felt she needed to do it.
``I don't think of it as a hobby because it's good history,'' she said. ``I feel like I have added something to history instead of just adding to the void.
``They almost became my ancestors in my head. It changed my life and the lives of those around me going up there that morning and finding that little diary.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by Motoya Nakamura, Staff
A 1794 diary found in the attic led to Aileen Collins' 20-year
search
Collins has published a book, "Travels in Britain," which deals with
Franklin D. Roosevelt's ancestor John Aspinwall.
by CNB