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.

My great-aunt's twenty-day marriage

This is a tale of two great-aunts.  One is mine; one is the Resident Fan Boy's. I'll tell you the tale of my great-aunt first -- although, in this case, it's more about her husband.  Not because he was more important or interesting, but because I'd never thought much about him -- until last week.

Ever since testing Demeter's DNA at Ancestry a little over a year ago, I've been working through hundreds of matches, labeling whether they are paternal or maternal, and, if possible, to which branch they belong. 

It's not boring work, but, the smaller the number of centiMorgans shared, the more likely it is that there are few clues to connections. Sometimes my mind wanders.

Last week, as I marked and noted, I found myself thinking about my great-aunt, who was swept away in the final wave of the great influenza pandemic.  She died on February 19, 1919 in Wolverhampton, at age 26, struggling to speak to her husband of six months.

It occurred to me that I didn't know when her widower died.  All I really knew about him was that he was an army driver during World War One, and that, some time after losing his wife, he asked my grandmother, who was eight years her sister's junior, to marry him.  She turned him down.  (Obviously.)  However, his name remained in her address book for at least the next decade.

I set about trying to find his death registration, but his name wasn't unusual, and there are several registrations for men bearing his name sharing his birth year, or thereabouts.

I found him in the 1891 census and narrowed down his birthdate to late February 1891, as he was noted as being six weeks old when the census was taken on April 5th.  He was the only son, with many sisters, raised in Wolverhampton, as my grandmother and her siblings were.

I found a possible second marriage for him.  My grandmother's address book, a birthday gift when she turned 19, ten months after her sister's death, has him first in Coventry, Warwickshire, then later in Newcastle-on-Tyne, as a manager for Daimler.  The 1939 National Register, taken just after the United Kingdom declared war on Germany, has a fellow born in late February 1891, a manager for a motor company, with his wife -- whose given names match those for a marriage registered in Coventry, a little over a year after my great-aunt's death.  The wife would have been almost the exact age of my grandmother.

However, the wife didn't have an unusual name either, so finding a death record was as daunting as locating one for her husband.

Before giving up, it occurred to me to double-check his World War One military record.  I don't think I'd given it more than a glance.

As I'd mentioned, he was a driver for the army, signing up shortly after the declaration of war in 1914 -- in Coventry, as it happens.  His army documents gave me a date of marriage, and it was different than what I had in my records:  11 July 1918 at St Jude Wolverhampton, my great-grandparents' parish church at the time.

I checked the dates of his postings.  He had been given a furlough in order to be married, and returned to France ten days after the wedding, so the wedding date in his military record is the correct one.  

He didn't return to Wolverhampton until nearly three months after the war ended.  He left France on February 9th, 1919 -- ten days later, his bride died of influenza.

Out of six months of marriage, they had been together barely twenty days.  (Oh gawd.  Did he bring the contagion with him?)

I'll tell you the tale of the Resident Fan Boy's great-aunt tomorrow.