In the midst of a master’s degree research project involving the Fifth District School, a one-room schoolhouse in the village area of the Seaport, I contacted Mary Virginia Morgan Goodman, who had been my seventh grade social studies teacher and penned a weekly column for The Norwich Bulletin titled “Noank Notes.”

She wrote about my efforts in her column and I began to get phone calls from some of her readers giving me tips on where to find materials.

Later in the summer, Mrs. Goodman called me.

“Robert, come down to Noank. I have something for you,” she said, sounding just as she had when I was 12 years old.

When I arrived at her home she handed me what looked like an elementary school copybook. It was the handwritten records of the Groton School Visitors from October 1857 to February 1881. She explained that one of her relatives had been the clerk of the board and when he finished his tenure, took the records home with him and put them on a shelf in his attic.

It should be that at this time Groton did not have the fine town hall that it has today. The two clerks whose names appeared in the minutes were N.G. Fish and Samuel P. Lamb, both from well-known local families.

The source of a lot of data for the project came from underneath the desk of another Lamb, the librarian at Mystic and Noank Library. Tucked away was a large volume containing issues of the Mystic Press for much of the time period I was studying.

From a variety of sources I learned that the school, which used two buildings, much as Freeman Hathaway and Mystic Academy used to do when my kids were little, wasn’t divided into grades such as we have today. Instead it had four departments: Primary, Intermediate, Junior, and Senior, with students spending two years in each.

Much as the Times papers publish honor roll lists, the Press published lists of students who had had perfect or almost perfect attendance each semester, along with the names of their teachers.

I scanned 10 years worth of newspapers looking for the perfect attendance lists and created a database of students and what department they were in year by year.

My guess was that any student who was able to maintain excellent attendance until the last year of the Senior Department must have come from a family of means and didn’t have to leave school for a job in a mill or go to sea.

I found a total of 52 students over the years who were listed as having good attendance. I then went to the Groton Town Hall to check their birth certificates, which in those days listed the father’s occupation.

The fathers’ occupations did not support my theory. I saw a butcher, a painter, a laborer, farmers, a rum seller, three seamen, two stonemasons, two carpenters, a fisherman, a blockmaker, a mechanic, a shoemaker, and a painter.

A few occupations suggested an above average income. Palmer Bindloss was a miller and owned a large amount of land and built a large house on the river. Henry Gilbert was listed as an engineer, though that likely meant that he worked on a steamer, possibly like my grandfather, shoveling coal. Gilbert Morgan was a cabinetmaker and Joseph Tribble was captain of a schooner. However, not all occupational descriptions can be used to accurately judge a family’s wealth. Horace Clift is listed as a carpenter, but the family was far from poor!

I was startled when going through the list of names. Here I was, a 20th century student studying the 19th century, when I spotted the name Lucretia Prentice, who was born in 1858. When I was a youngster living on Library Street, I lived next door to Miss Prentice who was then in her 90s. The house she shared with her spinster sister has since been converted into apartments.

I added lesson plans to the paper based on the textbooks I could find that were used in Groton. I know that the Seaport used the information I found because when an old friend, Dr. Bill Topkins, a Seaport interpreter, took on the roll of Mr. Avery the schoolmaster, he called me and we talked for about an hour. I visited his schoolroom one day and he was using one of my lessons.

By this time, I had written my paper and had earned my six credits. Everything was great until I got a letter from the Veterans Administration telling me that they were only going to pay me the same as if I’d taken a correspondence course, not graduate school. That meant a substantial reduction in the money I was expecting.

I studied the documents on which they had based their decision and showed them how they had misinterpreted their own policies. I also made a copy of the paper and provided it to the staff member who dealt with veterans affairs in Senator Weicker’s office. The senator was at that time a resident of downtown Mystic.

When I later called his office to ask about my case, his representative told me that he had taken the senator to Trumbull Airport that morning and Mr. Weicker was reading the paper when he got on the plane.

The result was that the VA changed its decision. And when Eastern Connecticut State University Dean William Billingham asked me to come to Willimantic to address a class, he introduced me as the only student he knew who had done battle with the VA and won.

Robert F. Welt of Mystic is a longtime retired teacher in the Groton Public Schools.