Tri-Counties Genealogy &
History by Joyce M. Tice
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Aunt Nellie's Button Box |
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| Article: Aunt Nellie's Button Box |
| Sullivan Township, Tioga County PA |
| Article by Joyce M. Tice 1998 |
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Aunt Nellie's Button Box
By Joyce M. Tice 
Some of you may have noticed a reference to Aunt Nellie's Button Box
as a symbol for a lot of STUFF to look through as on the obituary pages
of this site. Well, Aunt Nellie's button box was a real thing in my childhood
and in my life.
When I was a child I used to stay sometimes with Great Aunt Nellie.
I really loved her dearly. She was the sister-in-law of my grandmother
who died at age thirty when my father was only four years old. She and
her husband, Harold Mudge, had wanted to adopt my father but my grandfather
determined to raise my father and his older brother alone. Nevertheless,
Aunt Nellie, and other aunts and uncles and grandmothers and grandfathers
played a very important role in bringing up my father and uncle. When I
came along many years later, Aunt Nellie and Uncle Harold slipped into
the role of grandparent substitutes for me. One of the many great pleasures
of spending time with them - aside from the Chinese Checkers and the National
Geographics at their house - was the tin canister that was filled with
buttons. They were great playthings, all the colors, all the shapes, all
the patterns - fascinating! It was a special privilege to be given the
button box to play with. Matching them up into a set, sorting them, piling
them, looking at them. It is amazing what a child can do with a large tin
full of buttons, thousands of them. Just running them through one's fingers
is a pleasure - like King Midas with his gold.
Years later, Aunt Nellie in her migration to Ohio to live with her daughter,
gave the button box to my mother and she gave it to me. I used to sew a
lot, and from a practical point of view, it seemed a logical thing to do.
I would make good use of it. Well, I still approached it as a treasure
chest. Even as an adult that is what it seemed to be to me. I found all
kinds of interesting things in that box and I traipsed off to the library
to find out what all those beautiful buttons were about. Through the books
I found I was able to identify buttons far older than I would ever have
expected. From the way the manufacturer's name was on the back of some
of the large metal buttons, they could be dated. Manufacturers, then as
now, changed their names every few years as partnerships and ownership
and corporate structure changed. So, I was able to determine in the 1970s
that many of these buttons were from very early in the century and some
even from the nineteenth century. I found Civil War military buttons that
had to have come from Truman Mudge's uniforms put there in the button box
by his grieving mother Lucy BRONSON (Mudge). I found glass buttons, beautifully
faceted black glass buttons in many patterns. There were rubber buttons
and calico buttons. They were small and made of glass and had patterns
like calico on them. I found flower shaped buttons that I arranged into
a framed landscape "painting." There were bone underwear buttons, and shoe
buttons, and tons and tons of dark green plastic buttons that probably
came from Uncle Harold's green work clothes. I even found a few political
buttons. In short, the button box represented several generations of the
Mudge Family from which my paternal grandmother originated. It was a link
to the past and to people whom I could never meet. 
While I can not confirm the path of ownership of the button box and
its many contributors, I believe, based on the ages of the buttons, that
it had belonged to Lucy BRONSON (Mudge) and to her daughter in law Ruth
HOLLY (Mudge) and to her daughter in law, Nellie McCARTY (Mudge) and then
to me. All three of these women lived in the same location in the house
where my grandmother Mildred Mudge grew up with her siblings, Helen and
Harold. It is still a treasure to me. Most of the oldest buttons I have
arranged on display arrangements. Some of the lesser (historical) value
buttons I really did recycle and use. One thing for sure, I have never
thrown out a single one of them. They are part of the "inheritance" from
my ancestors and a link to objects, however trivial, that were theirs.
I love my button box. 
