Priscilla Jones was a woman who once you met, you never forgot.  She was proficient in genealogical research.  She was born in Dixfield, Maine, the daughter of Harry and Elizabeth (Thomas) Fortier.  She married Dr. Richard Jones in 1929.  His practice took them to Belfast, Maine where they made their home in the old Pitcher house at 5 Franklin Street with three daughters, Betty, Mary and Gail.

After the death of her husband in 1951, Priscilla went to Boston, Mass. where she worked in an office.  While in Boston she had the misfortune to break her ankle.  While recuperating, she worked on a genealogy book started by her mother, which had windows with ancestors’ names.  Some of the windows were empty, so she limped to the Boston Public Library to research to fill in the holes.  She, like many others, was soon bitten by the research bug.  She subsequently found that she had twenty-seven Mayflower ancestors.

When she came back to the spacious house on Franklin Street, her research began to fill up the many rooms with high ceilings with file cabinets filled with file folders, three-ring notebooks, as well as filling every nook and cranny.  She likened the research hunting as compulsive, telling a reporter in 1979 that the compulsion was likened to being an alcoholic.  Her fame quickly grew.  She received letters, queries and visitors from near and far.  When a plumber came to repair her water works, she would ask him his parents, grandparents, and all he knew about his family.  She later presented him with a hand-written genealogy of his family.  She was a smoker, and when she was engrossed in research, the cigarette ash would grow longer until it dropped.  She loved her cats, and they sprawled out over the books as she researched.

Priscilla purchased an almost complete set of the Mayflower Descendants.  She told me that when she started buying the Mayflower books and other noted Town and Local Histories and Genealogies, that they were “dirt cheap”, which allowed her to build her collection.  When a query came to her about a person’s ancestry, her keen mind knew where she had filed it.  She and others made many trips to the Maine State Library and Museum to copy old records and Census records.  She gathered her three-ring notebooks from yard sales, advertising from businesses, and her grandchildren’s castoffs.  Priscilla said that she preferred that people did their own research with her help, which was why she was hand-copying the local records, all of this was done before computers.  She did her typing on an old Royal typewriter.

Priscilla’s son-in-law was the Editor of the local newspaper, The Republican Journal, which started in 1829.  She was allowed to take the huge bound issues of the newspapers home.  She poured over the pages of the old newspapers from the beginning, page by page, hand-copying vital records, which consisted of births, deaths, marriages, obituaries and interesting articles onto file cards.  She had file drawers of the hundreds of file cards.  The local undertaker, Horace Coombs, allowed her to hand-copy the old funeral records, which had a wealth of information in them.  She remembered names, dates and places.  She recited the history of places and families, and was a walking encyclopedia of local genealogical information.

Hugh Russell, a prominent librarian at the Belfast Free Library fondly called three researchers, Priscilla Jones, Betsy Mosher and Isabel Morse Maresh, in a 1988 newspaper article, “The Big Three.”  Priscilla had taught her compulsion well to the others doing research.  When Priscilla passed away in 1986, she, like so many other researchers, had made no provision as to where her collection would go.  Her daughters donated the collection to the Penobscot Marine Museum, where researchers can go and take advantage of her years of research.  She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Mayflower Society, and submitted articles to the New England Historical and Genealogical Society of Newbury Street, Boston, Mass.

When Priscilla died, her friend, Isabel Morse Maresh wrote ’An Ode to Priscilla Jones’, which was published in the local newspaper, which reads: “Priscilla’s gone,” the caller said. “This time she didn’t make it.”  Priscilla, gone!  I cannot believe that she is gone.  To know her was to love her.

“I first met Priscilla in 1979 when I was struggling with my Heal-Heald ancestry.  “Come in,” she said, “I can help you!”  Help me, she did.  She pulled out one of her hundreds of hand-written files and there was the information on my great-great grandmother.  I didn’t return because I felt that she was too busy.  She phoned one day and said, “You didn’t come back.”  Thus started a friendship that would last a lifetime.

“She did not call herself a genealogist, but rather a ‘genealogical researcher’.  That was so like her.  She was so modest about her achievements, but generations to come will glean from her vast storehouse of knowledge.  She and Betsy Mosher spent hundreds of hours at the Maine State Archives hand-copying Federal Census records taken every decade and copied all of Waldo County from 1800 to 1880, got them indexed, typed and into libraries.  After meeting her, I, too, helped with copying Census records.  Priscilla typed the early Northport records, and copied all of the Vital Statistics from the early Republican Journals, until nearly 1892.  Her goal was to do to 1900, but she got too tired to finish it.  [After her death, I photocopied the vital records from The Republican Journal up to 1892, and gave a copy to the Belfast Free Library.]

“Priscilla did the genealogies of people who came to her, who wrote to her, for dignitaries, and for the little people, most without a charge.  She could remember places and dates that would boggle a much younger person‘s mind.

“Gone!  No, to those who met her and loved her, she shall never be gone.  We will remember the little things that she would laugh about.  Like when we went to Augusta to copy records, she would nod her head, and would laugh later about the squiggly lines caused when she fell asleep copying.

“Missed!  I shall miss those spontaneous phone calls, when her bubbly voice would say, “I’ve missed you!”  She called several days ago to tell me of the ancestry of a Belmont family that she felt that I would be interested in.

“It became a habit to stop in whenever I was in town. You never knew what to expect.  “How about lunch?”, so lunch it would be.  Or, “How about a walk?”  And to walk with her was to see the world through her eyes.  Because of her hip operations, the walks were slow and leisurely.  We saw the beauty of Water Street and recalled the splendor of early days in Belfast.  We saw beauty in a brilliant maple tree, holding its leaves after others had fallen.  We walked around the block at ‘The Cove’, ate wild blackberries and visited a friend.  I heard of the history of the McClintock block, which was hailed as the most modern apartments in Belfast when it was built.  She taught me much about genealogy.

“She had her political opinions, being a staunch Republican, and opinions of the daily world.  She never complained, though she had two major hip operations, and a heart condition.  She did not boast of her accomplishments or her position in life, though she had written articles for the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, and Mayflower groups.

“Priscilla gone!  No, she has just changed her address as easily as she gave up her large house on Franklin Street for an apartment as bright and cheery as she.  I know that when she stepped through her new address beyond the Pearly gates, she was greeted by those loved ones of hers, as well as the Mayflower group of which she had twenty-seven ancestors, by lords and ladies of old Europe as well as the early settlers of this area, whose names she knew so well.

“And she will still be taking her walks around heaven, and now, she won’t need her cane.  When a friend and fellow researcher passed away last year, she simply said, “We shall miss him.”

“We shall miss you, Priscilla, but to us you will never be gone.  “Enter thou into the Kingdom of Heaven, thou good and faithful servant.”