Listed but obsure

I was speaking yesterday of where my mind wanders while engaged in genealogical gate-keeping.  Sometimes I wind up in the company of long-dead great-aunts.

Inexperienced family researchers - I'm not claiming to be an expert genealogist, but I do have some experience - make the mistake of ignoring the "lateral" relatives, ie. aunts and uncles, especially those who, for whatever reason, didn't have children.

I can say to you without reservation, that childless aunts and uncles can be a goldmine to a family researcher.  They tend to take in struggling nieces and nephews, and mention them in wills, describing how they're related and who their parents are.

I'd like to tell you a bit about the Resident Fan Boy's great-aunt.  Up until a couple a weeks ago, I knew that she was born in Folkestone, Kent in 1878, and died in Montreal in 1948.  Brought up in the Church of England, she became the wife of a widowed Methodist minister (also British-born), who went on to become an advocate for prison reform in Canada, and was instrumental in promoting British immigration in Canada after the second World War.

About three years ago, I came across a scrapbook maintained by my late mother-in-law, which, by some miracle, had not been thrown away by the Resident Fan Boy.  It contained momentos of her various family members, particularly her aunts and uncles, and included a 1940s news clipping mentioning the great-aunt (in an article about her husband, of course), which mentioned her being a "well-known artist".

So it was, that a couple of weeks ago, my mind wandering, it occurred to me to try Googling.  I didn't have high hopes of a hit, but entered her full married name, and the word "artist". To my startlement and absolute delight, a website called worthpoint.com appeared, with a picture of one of her paintings!

It's an "oil on glass", painted in 1943. The website describes the great-aunt as "obscure but listed". (A bit of a comedown from "well-known" but it's been more than seventy years since she died.)  The web site does say she exhibited at the Art Association of Montreal in the 1930s, and sold a number of paintings, some for "a rather high price". Do I detect thinly veiled surprise?

Included are notes, apparently from the artist herself: "Kept 'lily' alive for a month in aspirin + water.frogs were in pond. Mr. Quesher, the curator, allowed me to take the lily from pond." (This was apparently at the Montreal Botanical Gardens.)

In a fit of excitement, I posted my findings on Facebook for the delight of the Resident Fan Boy's cousins -- and was met with polite approbation.

"Well, Mum," said elder daughter later, during our weekly Skype visit, "It's not like it was a fabulous painting..."  

And she was a long dead great-aunt, who had no kids, but judging from what little was said of her, mostly in relation to her husband, led a useful life of church work and social work, with a notable degree of creativity.  The last nibling with any memory of her died in 2013.

So I throw out a kind of lifeline, pulling these almost-forgotten women from the currents of passing time. It's kind of our calling, we genealogists, because family history is not just for the famous, the notorious, and those who had children.