by vienne 6 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
Some of you have read the first two volumes of Schulz and de Vienne's Separate Identity series recounting the Watch Tower's early years. Uncle B is working steadily on volume three, the last in the series despite declining health. A few rough draft paragraphs of chapter three are up on his blog. This post is temporary and will come down soon.
https://truthhistory.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-temporary-post.html
Great, thanks for all this hard work.
Gorby
Great work! Looking forward to the complete release.
I highly recommend his books and his blog. Fascinating well-researched objective history.
Vienne,
Do you have info on CT Russell during his life in Philadelphia?
I looked through mom's papers and called Uncle B. They never found more than what you can read in Separate Identity, volume one, pages 5-7. The Russells moved to Philadelphia about 1857. C. T. would have been about five years old. They lived at "1538 Lombard Street, in the densely populated Society Hill section." This seems to have been an area of lower middle class merchants and workers.
Joseph was a green grocer. His brother had interests in Philadelphia at the same time, but we do not know if they intertwined. "A daughter, Lucinda H. Russell, was born sometime in 1857. She died July 21, 1858, of scrofula, a tubercular infection of the lymph nodes in the neck. There was an unaccountably high incidence of scrofula in Philadelphia – about three times the national average. Contaminated milk, unsanitary environment, or parent-to-child transmission are all probable causes of the disease. Pasteur’s microbe experiments were about four years away, and physicians blamed scrofula on heredity. If the Russells asked the reason for Lucinda’s death, they would have been told that."
The Russells were involved in a Presbyterian church controversy, opting to attend a breakaway congregation: "While in Philadelphia the Russells were caught in a controversy among Presbyterians. On June 24, 1860, they joined the First Independent Church, formed around the choice of a pastor not accepted by the parent congregation. It was a Presbyterian body. Ann profoundly affected Charles Russell’s thinking. He recalled her as “a noble Christian woman whose instructions and example are still fresh to his memory and will never be forgotten”
C. T. Russell was about eight years old when they moved back to Allegheny, spending three years or slightly less of his life in Philadelphia. It is unlikely we would find more information. If you do, please share it.
Annie
Thank you Vienne.
I live half an hour from Philly on the NJ side and visited the city many times. I often wondered what life was like for Russell there.
