Great Grandmothers

With the Fox News / Dominion settlement and deadlock on getting Dianne Feinstein out of the Senate Judiciary Committee or the Senate, it's another depressing day for national news.

So it seems like a good day to avoid all of that. Someone on Twitter asked, Forget telling me about your dad, tell me about your great-grandmothers. That seems like a fun idea.

First, it's not surprising that what I know is patchy and sometimes more about their husbands. All of them were in central New York, born between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were all white, but other than that, in my head they don't have a lot in common because some died in the 19th or early 20th century, while others lived into the mid-20th century and so seem like someone who's more accessible.

Maternal maternal
Margaret/"Maggie" — She was an Irish immigrant who came to the U.S. with her uncle when she was 8 years old. She was born in Leeds, England, where her father, who was a bridge engineer, was working on a bridge. Her parents then left her behind (in Ireland, I think) so her father could work on a project in the U.S. — maybe the Brooklyn Bridge, given the timing. He died within a few years of arriving from a fall off the bridge, and her mother died in childbirth, probably before that. 

Maggie was raised by one of her mother's widowed sisters, with her cousins essentially as siblings. She left school at 14 to work as housekeeper to an Albany priest and his sister so she could contribute money to her aunt's family. Then, I think probably when she became an adult, she went to work as a tailor at a small business in her home town that was owned by a Bavarian immigrant couple. At age 29, she married their son, who also worked at the business. 

They had two children, one of whom was my grandmother. Maggie lived to about age 61, dying a few years after my mother was born in the early 1930s. Maggie is the most recent immigrant in my entire family tree, which is generally made of Puritan-descendants. Her Bavarian in-laws are the only other recent immigrants.

Maternal paternal
Gertrude/"Ella" — She died at 30, shortly after giving birth to her third child and first daughter. My grandfather was only around age 2 when she died, so he had no memory of her. Her family were farmers from a very small town or hamlet, though they had been in the area for a long time and had some social prominence.

Paternal maternal
Bessie — I've written about her before. She died at age 29 of quinsy, when my father's mother was only 10. She was working class to hard-scrabble, and had married pretty young. Her husband was seven years older than she, had already been married once before, and worked on the rail road.

Paternal paternal
Meeta — I wish I knew more about this great grandmother. Her mother tried to kill her father with a shotgun, blinding him, then killed herself. News coverage at the time said she thought he was having an affair, but who knows if that's true. 

Meeta divorced my great grandfather in the late 1920s or early 1930s and remarried, having a second family. I don't know the reason for the divorce. She lived at least into her 70s, maybe her 80s, though I don't remember meeting her. My great grandfather, her first husband, held a series of working-class jobs from the age of 12 (saw mill, shoe manufacturing, railroad, dairy, drug company) and ended his working life employed at a knitting mill where he helped organize a union just after World War II. So they probably lived a working class life. However, they were divorced during many of those jobs, and I don't know the circumstances of her second marriage. Maybe she was better off with her second husband. I'm not even sure where she lived with her second family.

I wish I knew more about all of them. Maybe I will, some day.