Sybil Moseley’s mother died in 1811 – leaving 19-year old Sybil an orphan to support herself as a schoolteacher, while other relatives took care of her younger sisters. (Bingham)
“At first her school was at Hartford and later at Canandaigua in western New York, which village was then in the far west. After three years at Canandaigua she determined to visit her friends and relatives and the people whom she was leaving tried to make her promise to return.”
“Her answer was, ‘I will, unless the Lord opens another door.’ She little imagined what that door would be. … She was interested in missions and had even desired to be a missionary.” (Restarick)
She met Hiram Bingham in Goshen Connecticut at his ordination. “He was introduced to Miss Moseley and he recalled a conversation with a fellow student at Andover who had said if he got an appointment as missionary he would ask a Miss Moseley to go with him as his wife.”
“Before he left Windsor he had asked her to go with him to the Sandwich islands as his wife. Their common desire to work in some mission field drew them together in affectionate sympathy and she told him she would be his co-worker among people whom they supposed were savages.”
“The ordination took place on September 29 (1819), and, as there was no time to lose they were married on October 11. On October 23 they sailed from Boston on the Thaddeus in company with six other missionaries and their wives.”
“Sybil Moseley Bingham wrote to her sister: ‘Since that memorable evening when I was introduced to him, I find that he has secured my love. God did indeed choose for me.’” (Restarick)
A couple weeks into the trip (November 9, 1819). Sybil’s journal entry notes, “Have been seventeen days on board. Hitherto the good hand of our God has been upon us. … Sea-sickness has been severe upon most, yet not so much so as upon many who have gone before us.” (Sybil)
“For the first month out, the sea was rough, and the winds not favorable, and most of the passengers felt the inconvenience of their new mode of life; and some suffered much and long from sea-sickness.” (Hiram) Sea sickness continued for her and the others throughout the 18,000-mile voyage.
“Life in the Paradise of the Pacific was anything but healthy in the years when Honolulu was a village of grass huts on a dusty plain.”
“Sybil was frail to begin with, if one can judge from her likeness in the portrait of the Binghams painted by Samuel FB Morse (of the Morse code and telegraph) before their departure for the Pacific: where an idealized Hiram gazes confidently from the little oval frame, Sybil’s long thin nose and watery blue eyes make her look as if she had a cold.” (Bingham)
“For twenty years she worked with him and for him and bore his children, but the cost to nature was a wasted body that finally came to seem to Hiram more important than his mission.”
“Hiram anticipated that a few months rest in what they considered the more healthful climate of New England would put her on her feet, and they would return to carry on the great work with which the Mission Board had originally charged them.” (Bingham)
On August 3, 1840, they sailed back to the continent on the Flora. “The cabin of the Flora is very small, having three state-rooms, one of which belonging to the captain is the only one whose dimensions were intended, for comfort.” (Olmstead)
They returned to New England. “Sybil’s health did not improve. … (she went to) Hartford to be nursed by her sister. She had a chronic cough. Whether she or Hiram knew it, she was dying of the prevailing malady, ‘consumption.’” Then “Hiram and Sybil had found a ‘refuge’ in Easthampton (Massachusetts) with ‘kind friends.’”
“She seemed most comfortable sitting in her rocking chair, the chair he had lovingly fashioned for her on their arrival in Honolulu twenty-eight years before -as a Vermont farm boy he had been handy with tools—and then brought back around Cape Horn. Now, as it became clear the end was near.” (Bingham)
“(I)n accordance with her former request to be in her chair when God should send the summons, we placed her there, and sustained her head and hands and feet. I asked, how do you feel now, ‘I feel a little rested’ (or ‘exhausted’) not quite distinctly.”
Sybil’s rocking chair, “which a thousand times rested her weary frame & gave her much comfort … proved to be remarkably easy as to its form & balance, light, strong and durable having now been in use about 30 years”. (Bingham letter to H Hill, March 12, 1850)
“I said again, ‘do you feel exhausted?’ ‘Not as much as I should expect,’ she said, and soon repeated ‘Let His name be praised’. ‘Be bold to speak the truth’ – ‘The Lord cares for me’ – then, in a low tone ‘Stop, Stop – I live.’”
“Then passed into a comatose state and spoke no more, but appeared to sleep.” (Hiram) “(Daughter) Lydia, thirteen years old, in her later account, shortened the time to ‘a few more throbbings of her loving heart’ …”
“while ‘father prayed, commending her to God,’ and sang two verses of a hymn beginning: Go, pilgrim, to thy Saviour; On joyful wings ascend.” (Bingham)
Sybil died in her rocking chair on February 27, 1848 in Easthampton, Massachusetts. “For Hiram, Jr., finally helping his father lift his mother out of the rocking chair, her death must have been deeply affecting. But he was young and strong.”
A generation later he wrote to his own son (Hiram III), ‘If ever there was in this world a woman who was noble, honest, generous, loving, tender-hearted and sympathetic, that woman was your grandmother.” (Bingham)
“Sybil was buried in the Williston family plot in the old cemetery not far from the Academy (a school her children had attended).” (Bingham)
Hiram later remarried. “In an age when housework was not yet a male occupation, few men willingly remained widowers. It was natural for Sybil’s husband to remarry, and all the more if Sybil had known and approved the new wife.” (Bingham)
Hiram and his second wife (Naomi) were buried in the New Haven City Burial Ground. Later, Hiram III took it upon himself to reunite Hiram and Sybil by disinterring Sybil’s bones and placing them next to Hiram in New Haven.
Hiram III “provided a suitable box 3 ft x 16 in x 18 in and had his man ready to make the exhumation. … After digging down about three feet through a sandy soil we came upon the remains. They lay together directly in front of the stone. There was no trace of any box or container of any sort except two old fashioned brass handles which were probably on the coffin.”
“The bones were all together. The skull, leg bones and ribs were all within a few inches of each other. We looked very carefully for traces of a box but found none. … The gravedigger searched very thoroughly, and I believe that all of the remains that lay there were safely removed.”
Ultimately, Hiram III “brought them with him in his personal luggage when he had come to Yale as a freshman”. (Bingham) (Much of the information here, as well as the title, comes from Alfred Bingham, son of Hiram III.)
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