In 2012, Ellen Touchstone, an American educator, moved from the United States to Suzhou, Jiangsu, the city where her grandparents had served as Methodist missionaries a century earlier.
Little could her grandparents, Cary Touchstone and Mabel Ellen (Thomas) Touchstone, a couple from the Methodist Episcopal Church, South (MECS), have imagined that Ellen would stay in Suzhou for over 12 years, retracing their footsteps and uncovering their legacy.
The Original Story
Born in 1882 and 1889, respectively, Cary and Mabel Touchstone arrived in China as missionaries in 1917, got married in 1919, and returned to the U.S. in 1922.
Cary, originally from Texas with a bachelor’s degree in teaching, taught locally for several years and enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, founded by MECS. According to the minutes of the mission board meeting of MECS, her grandfather was supposed to serve as a missionary in Mexico, but some tension between the governments of the U.S. and Mexico at the time might have altered his course. Instead, he answered a job request from the then president of Soochow University—the first Western-style university in China, founded by MECS in Suzhou in 1900—for an English secretary. He became both the president’s secretary and the university's treasurer.
Mabel, originally from Pennsylvania, earned a hard-won bachelor's degree from a nursing school affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania in 1913. According to records from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, she was a nurse in Ohio and applied to become a Rockefeller nurse. She had also considered opportunities with the International Red Cross or a position at Suzhou’s Boxi Hospital, founded by MECS in 1883 and affiliated with Soochow University (now the First Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University). She ultimately chose Suzhou, where she met Cary and became the head nurse at the hospital.
Cary and Mabel had their first two children there before returning to the U.S. in 1922. Ellen Touchstone is the daughter of their fourth child, Frank Virgil Touchstone, who was born in 1927 in the U.S. and married Dorothy Viola Anderson.
Five Years in China
There has been no self-written, preserved record about Ellen’s grandparents’ life in China, nor did Ellen ever meet them. However, through university archives, she discovered that Cary and Mabel got married in the summer of 1919 under the witness of the U.S. consul in Shanghai, about two years after their arrival in China. Fortunately, a diary entry written by Joseph Whiteside, her grandfather’s colleague, described their courtship: “I saw Cary Touchstone and Mabel Ellen Thomas on the city wall tonight, walking very close together.”
Their first daughter, Mary, was born in 1920, and their son, Joseph, followed in 1921. According to Mary’s baby book, she was likely baptized at St. John's Church in Suzhou. However, tragedy struck when Mabel and the two children contracted malaria. Although Mabel recovered fully, the children were left deaf due to high doses of quinine, which damaged their hearing.
Ellen inferred that the possible reason why they left China in July 1922 was that the two children would need a special education after losing hearing due to a disease. Back in the United States, the two children received training in lip reading and excelled academically. Later, the couple had two more children.
The Follow-up Story in the U.S.
The Touchstones first lived in Arkansas, where they ran a grocery store, before moving to Kentucky, where Cary worked at a Christian college. In Pennsylvania, they farmed and sold milk from their cows to the nearby Hershey’s Chocolate Company. Later, in Nacogdoches, Texas, Mabel served as the administrator of a maternity hospital. The couple eventually settled in Dallas, where they remained until their passing in 1963 and 1961, respectively.
Their first son Joseph became a professor of biochemistry, an active Episcopalian, and a father to three sons raised in the faith. Mary earned a master’s degree in library science and later worked for a multinational corporation. Their third child, Tom, tragically died at 21 in a plane crash while serving as a navigator on bomber planes in World War II.
Also born in the U.S., Ellen’s father XXX went on to get his undergraduate degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where her grandparents were living at that time. Her father married her mother XXX, who was raised as a Southern Baptist. They later became members of the Presbyterian Church of the U.S.A. and active in the church. Working as a clinical psychologist, her father was also an elder in the church and started Stephen’s Ministry, a type of counseling service, at the First Presbyterian Church of Hastings, Nebraska.
The Hard Journey to Uncover Family History in Suzhou
The death of Ellen’s father in 2005 became the catalyst for her deep dive into family history. A large traditional Chinese table, always displayed in the living room, was a prized possession in their family, which her grandparents had shipped all the way back to the U.S. While sorting through the belongings in her parents' house's basement, she discovered more Chinese artifacts and related documents from their time in China. This discovery sparked her desire to learn more about family history, including her grandparents' untold stories in China.
"There was no one I could ask," Ellen recalled, as her father, uncles, and aunt had all passed away. However, a job offer from Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University brought her to Suzhou in 2012.
Now the associate dean for Responsible and Sustainable Business Education at the International Business School Suzhou, Ellen has dedicated her free time to researching her family history and also volunteering in the local community. Her journey has been featured in an award-winning documentary by Suzhou Broadcasting System and a premier TV program on CCTV 4.
During her leisure time, she went through local archives, such as from Soochow University to dig out her family stories. She has been in touch with St. John’s Church to seek any record about her grandparents.
Even Ellen has also searched through the archives from American universities, including the Divinity School of Duke University, Columbia University, and Drew University in New Jersey. She recognized her grandmother Mabel through a digital photo from Yale University’s missionaries’ special collection, though there was no name. She has a pendant on which "life saver" was inscribed that Mabel possibly used to explain that she was there to help. "I’m sure there were some difficult situations that she had to deal with." Ellen wants more stories about her grandmother.
In 1921, her grandfather went on a month-long famine relief mission in China. According to the diary entries written by Whiteside, he was collecting money to help with famine relief. There was a train ticket given by the government, which could be an all-access pass. “There must have been very difficult work.” But little information has been known about this.
In the archives at the David M. Rubinstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, there was a wedding photo of Dwight Lamar Sherertz, one of her grandfather's roommates, and Margarita Mary Park, the latter who was from two famous missionary families in China, the Lambuths and the Parks, around three months after her grandparents' wedding day. "I can't imagine that my grandparents wouldn't also have some type of wedding photograph." In 2016, she went through photo studios in Suzhou that still reserved old photos of expats in the old times, but nothing was found.
More to Discover
Ellen later encountered some Chinese friends who directed her to more details. Through her school in China, she was in touch with the archivist of Soochow University, where a couple of her grandparents' photos were found. Ellen is still in search of more Soochow University stories from that time period to discover more hidden stories.
She wants to find some evidence through records of their involvement in St. John’s Church. More information about her grandparents in Suzhou and Shanghai would be appreciated.
"My grandparents were some of the original shareholders in the Soochow Brick and Tile Company which Dr. John Snell founded presumably to make bricks for the renovation of the hospital in 1920. I would love to discover what happened to that company and if any of the buildings or records are still available," she added.
She is also in search of the “amah” who took care of her aunt and uncle in Suzhou. “I would like to meet the amah, and that would be like having another Suzhou family.”
Family Legacy Continues…
Ellen commented on the work of her grandfather at Soochow University and her grandmother as the nurse leader of the hospital as “helping to build the infrastructure for the higher education system and the medical system in China.” What was more, Mabel created career opportunities for women through medical training at the Boxi Hospital, one of the earliest hospitals to train women nurses in China.
Continuing their legacy, Ellen works as a professor to educate Chinese and international business students in Suzhou. Meanwhile, she served at a COVID-19 testing site during the COVID-19 pandemic in Suzhou. Deeply connected to what her grandmother did, she said that according to Joseph Whiteside’s diary entry, American missionaries from MECS gathered one night at Mabel’s house, where they created masks for an epidemic in Nanjing about one century ago.
“I hope to remind people that we Americans and Chinese have collaborated successfully for over a century, and we should continue that,” said Ellen. She also seeks to establish connections between Vanderbilt University and Soochow University since many of the American founders of Soochow University came from Vanderbilt University.
What’s more, Ellen hopes that young people will be inspired to collect family stories and even record family history from older relatives who are still alive. “Every family has amazing stories and tales of resilience, which can help all of us as we’re dealing with the challenges we face nowadays.”
Ellen Touchstone can be reached via her email addresses:
