Introduction
One thing I’ve learned from my ancestry research over the
years is the fact that most of those who have come before me have lived lives
as ordinary as mine. Over the centuries and through the generations, their
lives were filled with many of the same joys and pains experienced by people
living today. Given the chance to describe the important events in their own
lives, our ancestors would likely highlight the same sorts of events as we
would: finding true love, the birth of a child, the loss of a family member, an
increase (or loss) of property, a close friendship. These are things that, for
the individual, are extraordinary within the context of their own life but in a
broader sense are an ordinary part of the human condition.
Still, finding a new and undiscovered detail about the life
of an ancestor or someone who lived long ago in the community, no matter how
“ordinary” that detail may be in the larger scheme of things, gives the ardent
researcher a real sense of satisfaction. Once in a great while, I come across
something in my research that is completely unexpected and makes me say, “Wow!
That’s surprising”. It could be a fact
from a vital document, a news article, a property record, or a picture of
person or location from a different angle that helps me understand the time or
place more deeply and richly than before.
Recently, I was paging through old newspaper articles researching
my Woodward ancestors and I stumbled across a story that caught my attention in
this way. The story involves Aaron Klair Woodward, a son (one of a long list of
sons and daughters) of Joseph Woodward and Mary Klair, both of Delaware. Aaron, who was the brother of my third
great-grandmother Hannah Woodward Armstrong, lived his entire life in rural New
Castle County from his birth in 1836 until his passing in 1904, most of it in
Christiana Hundred. The event in question occurred in October, 1874 and surely
had a profound impact on Aaron and his family’s life, the lives of six young
men from Wilmington, and especially the family of one William Lukens, a teenage
boy whose family lived in Wilmington. At the time of the incident, Aaron
Woodward and his wife, Mary Ann Woodward, nee Stidham (daughter of Gilpin
Stidham) were parents of an eight year old boy and a fourteen week old baby
boy. Their family lived on a farm of about 100 acres a few miles outside the
city boundary along today’s Faulkland Road. As a result of this tragic event, a
young man barely 18 years of age would lose his life and an ordinary farmer with
a young family would somehow find himself on trial, fighting for his own life.
