52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 2019 Week 4 Prompt - I'd Like To Meet.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

2019

Week 4

Prompt - I'd Like To Meet

I have scanned many photo albums over the years. I like to think that every picture tells a story. The story comes more easily if you know who is in the picture and when it was taken. Very few people labelled their photos. Why would we? We know who they are. True, but when they get passed down two or three or more generations, it becomes easy to lose track of who the people are in the photograph. I have a few scanned photo albums just labelled as Photographs of Unknown People and I have added which family they come from.

Mary McLaughlin, my maternal grandmother was my closest grandparent. As I unravel her life story I find that she has a different side to her than the quiet, demure, penultimate “church lady” that I knew. My Aunt Phyllis once told me that apparently my grandmother gave her parents a very hard time as a teenager. I find this hard to imagine. But who knows? 

4 Willson Sisters!

Back of Same Photograph

In my photo album of unknown people in Mary McLaughlin family, I came across this picture. I believe the back of the photograph is in the hand of Mary. “4 Willson (sic) Sisters. I worked with ? They were wonderful friends....in the years of 1916, 1917, 1918, 1919.”

I have heard that when Mary was in Winnipeg before she was married to her first husband she worked in a chocolate factory. Are they co-workers from the chocolate factory? The time period seems to indicate the probable time would coincide.

When I looked at the photograph for the first time I thought they were some kind of vaudeville act. Alas no. It does seem like the attire of the time. The head bands, the big bows, the floating smock tops, the longer skirts or dresses and the white button up boots seem to verify the dates on the back of the photograph. None the less they do look like fun friends to me. And who better to know what Mary was really like than these young ladies. I would have liked to meet them when they lived because I hope they would have told me stories of a grandmother I did not know. Was it these ladies that Mary chummed with while giving her parents a hard time? Was it these ladies that introduced Mary to her first husband? What exactly did they share to have been named “wonderful friends”? Friends hold the secrets that one dare not tell their own family. Oh how I wished I knew the Wilson sisters while they lived. Maybe then I would know the other side of Grandmother Mary McLaughlin!

Wendy