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Note: ing sort, who went for nice but simple plain dark clothing - as I do. Her hair was clean, shiny, and pulled back into a plain bun. Her face was plain, and her eyes were shut. The 1870 census showed her a school teacher, living with her parents. William Henry Smith Sr. had also been a school teacher, and probably was rather quiet.
A photo of the family around 1880 shows her dressed in a stylish, low cut, black gown, seated on the porch of the family house, with the children strewn around on the lawn and William Henry Sr. standing stiffly on one side of the lawn with a staff. Plain colored clothes of stylish cut was the style of proper Quaker women in the New Garden area.
In the first photo, William Henry has white hair and Scotch-Irish-Pennsylvania-Dutch features, and looks rather like Jesse on Dukes of Hazard, though thinner.
I imagine her eyes were closed because of the camera lights; but Mary Emma looks EXACTLY like the people I watched at the Quaker meeting in Buffalo for an hour. Same lines on face, same appearance of quiet but intense emotionality. Look also at how Mary Emma is dressed. She looks extremely nice. She has her hair VERY nicely done up in a simple bun; it is clean and shiny, and she is wearing a nice but simpler than was the style dress in the style of her prosperous Quaker people. Contrast it with the similar but greatly laced and puffed-sleeved dress that her contemporaries of the Dehart family wore to have their pictures taken. In the picture that shows her sitting on the porch of the Smith farm house, she similarly has on a stylish but simple dark colored gown.
Other family photos that show her with her eyes open make it clear that she had a very strong personality. She always wore old-fashioned stylish black dresses, even when the younger women around her were dressed very differently.
Mary Emma Thompson belonged to a small inbred clan of families that had founded and more or less continuously ran the New Garden Quaker meeting. They served as elders, governed the meeting, looked out for the welfare of meeting members, and as services evolved toward standard Christianity they led worship. They were descended from Irish Quakers who settled in southeastern Chester County, Pennsylvania, and northern New Castle County, Delaware, around 1700. The earliest of them purchased land directly from Penn. They came from a small geographical area in Ireland, and nearly all of them ultimately came from or were descendants of people who had come to Ireland from England. Some of them were Quakers when they left England, and some became Quakers in Ireland. They were called "Irish Quakers". See the notes on emigrants John Chambers and John Miller for more on the characteristics of these people.
John Miller and his inbred descendants - including descendants of probably brothers - had a characteristic asocial, very quiet, very serious, and very intense temperament, and my father inherited it.
Note: A family photo I have shows her as a possibly formal or stiff and retir
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