Barbara A. Yates

          Barbara Ann Yates was born on October 14^th, 1933 in Schoharie County, New York, the only child of John Yates and Marion Haines Yates. Barbara’s family had deep roots in the area, with her maternal ancestors arriving in the region as Protestant dissenters from Catholic-dominated south Germany via the Low Countries in 1714. The Haines family members who settled in Schoharie County were yeoman farmers who received several hundred acres of farmland in the area. The farmhouse and land belonging to Barbara’s direct maternal ancestor had been passed down father-to-son until 1944, when it was sold by her mother and aunts. However, the land had not been farmed by any Haines family member since Barbara’s maternal grandfather rented the land out to tenant farmers so that he could pursue a non-agricultural career, the first member of the family to do so. 

            The Haines grandfather’s trajectory is important as it bears striking similarities to that of Barbara herself. Her grandfather wanted to be an army officer but as a “politically-unconnected farm boy” he was unable to secure a senatorial endorsement required to enroll in officer training at West Point. So, instead he went to Albany State College where he studied in the pre-med track and finished medical training at Up-State Medical Center before starting a country practice in the county seat of Schoharie.[1] Like Barbara, her maternal grandfather craved travel and adventure and, so, he enlisted in Schoharie County Volunteers where he was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Army, and served as an army physician in Philippines during the Spanish-American War (April-August, 1898). Army life and international travel must have suited him, as he went on to re-enlist as a Major and worked on malaria mitigation projects in the then-under-construction Panama Canal. International travel and government service are overlapping features of Barbara’s life and those of her maternal grandfather. Indeed, Barbara herself identified these connections in a fragment of an autobiography where she explains the lengthy treatment of her maternal grandfather’s career because it reflected that her “early family socialization was intimately related to the East coast WASP colonial tradition of duty, honor and service to the country.” While Barbara was not a medical doctor and she would eventually leave federal service for academia, it is hard not to read overlaps between her career trajectory and interests and those of her maternal grandfather.

            We know slightly less about Barbara’s paternal family history as the autobiographical fragments she left have scarce information. However, she does state that the Yates family’s ancestral home was the village of Fonda, also in upstate New York and close to where the Haines side of the family had their land. John Yates was born and raised in Fonda along with his parents and siblings, and Barbara writes that she spent the first seven years of her life living directly across the Mohawk River from Fonda proper. Barbara writes that her parents always maintained that there was a distant familial relationship between the Yates family and the more famous Fonda family that includes Hollywood stars Henry, Peter, and Jane Fonda. Indeed, she writes that later in life her mother informed her that, had she been born male, she would have been named Peter Fonda Yates in recognition of this supposed relation. Whether this blood relation actually existed, and why the connection would only be highlighted in name had she been male, are left unclear in Barbara’s recollections. 

             Barbara writes that memories of her early years are rather sparse and while she can remember some isolated episodes from the period, she cannot recall routine family life or details like what her favorite childhood foods were. The haziness of these memories is likely the result of recollections many decades after the fact, but also possibly due to the emotional specificities of Barbara’s family life and relationships. Reading her autobiographical fragments and speaking with people who knew her, it is clear that Barbara Yates was not an overly emotional person. The more reserved demeanor is perhaps rooted in Barbara’s relationship with her parents and, indeed, the relationship between her mother and father both of which she describes as relatively emotionless. For example, Barbara describes the correspondence between her parents from 1915, which she found later in life, as being filled with casual chatter and life updates that “were in no sense love letters and expressed no intimate feelings.” Indeed, Barbara speculates that her parents’ marriage was due more to convenience than affection, writing “My guess is that John, my future father, was a comfortable friend of long acquaintance and that the marriage was based, not on love, but upon my mother’s fantasies of being the wife of a well-off small town businessman with the proper lineage (pedigree).”[2]

            The emotional distance between her parents may have also characterized Barbara’s relationship with them, as nowhere in her memoir fragments does she write about emotional content or relationships with either parent. Despite having a seemingly distant relationship with her parents, Yates clearly maintained a connection to her extended family roots and ancestral home throughout her life. Her papers include a clipping advertising a publication called The New World Book of Yates, which purports to contain information on the Yates Family in the Western Hemisphere since 1619.[3] In a 1959 letter to a friend, written while living in Indonesia and working for USIS, Yates writes that she intends to buy back her family farm using her savings and money she recently inherited. Yates does not indicate a fondness for nor desire to work the land, but states to her friend that it would be a shame to lose hold of a property that had been in her family for 250 years. This plan never materialized, as Barbara Yates settled in San Diego after retiring from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and she spent the remaining years of her life there. However, the fact that she researched her family history and sought to include these details in her memoir indicate that she maintained an interest in her roots and desired to expand on her knowledge of her family’s history.