“Mr. Welt, I think you should start your lessons with, ‘Once upon a time,’” said 12-year-old Allison, a student in my American history class. When I asked her why, she answered, “Because you’re always telling us stories, and that’s how stories begin.”

So, I queried, “How should stories end?” As I expected, her answer was, “And they lived happily ever after!”

“Well,” I told her, “I can certainly begin with ‘Once upon a time,’ but, given what I’m teaching, I can’t always end my lessons the way your daddy did when he read you bedtime stories.”

The first day of class every year was devoted to such things as classroom rules. Mine were be safe, be polite, be prepared. We also covered fire drill, Code Red procedures and medical emergencies.

For instance, I told them, if you have a nosebleed, go outside and around the building and enter by the side door near the nurse’s office. Don’t bleed on the floor because the custodian has to mop it up with bleach!

On the second day, after all the nuts and bolts were out of the way, I followed Allison’s advice and started class with this true story:

Once upon a time in 1861, in the town of Union, which is directly north of here on the Massachusetts border, a baby girl was born. Her parents, who owned a dairy farm, named her Ella. Ella was a smart child who did well in school, and like her mother, loved flowers.

When she completed the district school in Union, her parents sent her to Stafford Springs for high school. You probably will be surprised to learn that in those days not all youngsters went to high school, and many towns, such as Union and our own Groton, didn’t have high schools.

Upon graduation from high school, Ella became a teacher in Union. The requirements for being hired as a teacher were not as stringent as they are today. A college education was not required.

About a year and a half after Ella’s birth, a boy named Arthur was born in the town of Groton, Massachusetts. Not long after that, his father, who had taken a new job as an insurance salesman, moved the family to Rhode Island. Arthur, who had two brothers, was also very bright and graduated from Woonsocket High School. From there he went to Brown University in Providence, where, by that time, the family was living.

Arthur did well at Brown. Not only did he write for the school magazine, he played baseball and belonged to Delta Upsilon fraternity. He seemed to believe he worked best under pressure.

Before graduating from Brown, Arthur was offered a job teaching the Select School in Union. This school was an attempt to avoid having to send older students out of town for further education.

While teaching in Union, Arthur met another Union teacher – Ella, and they became very good friends.

In fact, he tutored her in subjects in which she was weak, such as algebra and Latin. At the end of the year, the town decided to do away with the select school model and Arthur went back to Brown.

After his return to college, Arthur and Ella continued to correspond quite regularly. When he graduated in 1885, the two of them were married in the Congregational Church in Union.

The young couple settled in Providence where Arthur taught school, and not much later became a principal. It seemed to be common practice at that time that if a school had more than one teacher, a male teacher became principal, regardless of seniority.

Arthur continued his education, earning a master’s degree from Harvard. The marriage produced two children; Florence, nicknamed Totkins, was born in 1888, and her brother Raymond a year later.

Arthur began a Ph. D. program at Cornell, but after moving his family to Ithica, was forced for mental reasons to leave the university. His tuition was refunded to his wife, who took the children back with her to the farm in Union, while Arthur moved in with his mother in Providence and later was admitted to a sanitarium in Rhode Island.

From time to time Arthur held jobs, including teaching at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, but never lasted for long at any of them. While he and Ella kept in contact, they apparently never lived together again. They are, however, buried side by side in the Union cemetery. Not quite a “happily ever after ending.”

Totkins, meanwhile, graduated from Stafford Springs High School, Smith College, and earned a master’s degree from Connecticut Agricultural College in Storrs. She was hired to teach high school in New Haven, where she was also active as a Campfire Girls leader. She later taught botany at Connecticut College for Women and helped establish the arboretum at that school. Eventually she earned a Ph. D. from Columbia and became a professor at Wheaton College. Florence never married and when she retired from teaching, moved back to Union. Her brother, who had attended the Massachusetts College of Agriculture in Amherst, later served the town as Chairman of the Board of Education.

After sharing this story with my students, I would ask them how do they think I know all this about the Barrows? Their immediate response is that they’re my family. I hasten to assure them that I am not related to the Barrows and, in fact, have never even met any of them.

The next answer is that I read it in a book. I explain that I found one sentence regarding Arthur in a book about Union, Connecticut.

Many students will say that I found it on the internet. As I explain, Vice President Gore hadn’t invented the internet when we started our Barrows research, though it has helped a lot since.

Eventually I hold up a very old letter and explain that over many years my students have read, transcribed and researched what today are several notebooks of correspondence of the Barrows family. That is how we began to learn about Arthur, Ella and Totkins.

I point out that these letters are what historians call primary sources. My definition is that a primary source is something created during the time period being studied. They are the meat of historical research.

From there we go on to discuss what else can be a primary source; such as birth certificates, death certificates, medical records, school records, photographs, yearbooks and enough others to fill a white board.

I then challenge them to list five different primary sources they have at home that a historian 100 years from now could use to write the student’s biography after he or she was famous. This could include report cards, newspaper clippings about a Little League game, cheerleader photos, birth certificates, Baptismal certificates, shot records and even baby books. They’re told not to bring anything in to class, just make a list. I point out, by the way, that anything stored electronically will probably not be available to historians in the future. After all, how many of them are familiar with 5 ½ inch floppies!

Robert F. Welt is a retired Groton Public Schools teacher who lives in Mystic.