Grandma Pearl

Last night I watched "Influenza 1918" on American Experience, thinking the whole time of my maternal grandmother, Pearl Ethel Wilson McClellan, who died during that horrible epidemic. Aside from the connection of our physical resemblance, I feel such a deep affection for her, partly because of how much my father loved her and partly because of what I know from a few letters she sent to her father-in-law, John Arthur McClellan, between 1914 and 1917.

In her letters, she talks of her life in Fullerton, Louisiana—of eating fresh peas from her garden and finding a milk cow and raising a few chickens. She talks of her worries about how many hours my grandfather, who she called “Joe,” and his brother Buell worked. Her deep love for my father (“Sonny Boy”) shines through when she writes about him. He was not quite two when she wrote, “I must say he is the cutest. When it comes to being rhowdy, tough, and mischievious. He dont seem like a baby. He is so stout and active. He is not one bit of trouble. Only have to watch him to keep him from running away. He can say so many cute words. We just think he is the grandest little Son on earth. Ha ha. Oh yes he can count to ten.”

Eventually, Pearl and Joe moved back to Texas from Fullerton, Louisiana, settling in Orange, on the Texas-Louisiana border. There Joe and Buell found work in the shipyards of Port Arthur, still struggling to keep steady work, still struggling to make ends meet. Pearl continued her efforts to make a happy, loving home for my father. However, in October 1918, tragedy hit the family. The influenza epidemic that was sweeping the world came to East Texas. Pearl was stricken with the disease and died within days. How devastated Joe must have been to lose his darling wife! She was only 22. My father, who was 4 at the time, never truly recovered from losing his mother. When he did speak of her in later years, a smile would come to his face, a mixture of the warmth of sweet memories and the sadness of loss.

History tells us about dates and events. Family stories tell us about how history played out in everyday lives. How lucky I am to have these letters, a few photos, and a handful of documents that bring to life my dear Grandma Pearl. Rest in peace, sweet woman.

Solving Mysteries

A lifetime love of mysteries, which I inherited from both my parents, has made family research all the more fun for me. Who are these people in the unlabeled pictures? When was the picture taken and where? Is the furniture in the picture a prop or a treasured family sofa or chair?

This woman seems to be wearing a nurse's uniform
from sometime around the Civil War years.
Who in my family was a nurse at that time?

I apply so many strategies and trails of clues as I sort through these photos. Sometimes I'll recognize a similar background or piece of furniture in two photos, which can help me tie the subjects together. Other times it's the set of the eyes or a hairline that helps me identify a long-dead relative. Occasionally a first name has been written on the back of a photo or tintype, which may help me figure out who the person is. If my memory doesn't immediately make the connection, my next step is to search on ancestry.com.

Little Edna

The Find Person option for an already established tree allows me to type in a single name to see if I can find a match. Today that option paid off. I have a somewhat damaged tintype of a young child (could be a boy or a girl) that looks to be from the late 1800s. On the back of the tintype, in barely readable handwriting is the name "Edna," with something else written below, which I can't quite make out. As I type in "Edna," the name Edna Wilson (b. 1896-) comes up. Edna was a younger sister of my maternal grandmother Pearl Wilson McClellan (1894-1918).

I knew nothing about Edna up until today, and I still have very little information on her. According to some hints, she may have died in Texas at some point, which is where the Wilsons were born and raised. According to others, she may have married a man named Sydney Cousins and eventually died in Louisiana. That's the thing with the information one finds on Ancestry. It's a little like asking different aged relatives about someone—each story is different and no more reliable than the last. Still, as the hints and clues pile up, eventually some sort of truth is usually found.

In this Wilson family picture, I think that must be Edna on the far right. My Grandma Pearl is the third one from the right, so the girl with the bow in her hair would be about the right age for Edna. Edna was definitely still alive and living at home in the 1910 census, which would be about the same time that this picture was taken. The two women on the left are most likely Mabel (b. 1982) and Myrtie (b. 1889) or Margaret (b.1890). The man with the hat is probably Grover Cleveland Wilson (1884-1979) and the other man is probably Herbert (1887-1950).

That jawline should be a clue. Could this be my paternal
great-grandmother Mary (Mollie) Ophelia Gray?

As I've mentioned before, my Grandma Pearl died in the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, when my father was four. There must have been some kind of rift between the Wilsons and my grandfather J.Y., because he and my father didn't seem to stay in contact with them after Pearl died. I thought I had almost no pictures from Grandma Pearl's side of the family, but with the discovery of the tintype of my great-aunt Edna, I'm hoping that I have more that just haven't been identified yet. Just more mysteries to solve.

Those eyes are quite striking.
Perhaps they're kin to Edna?

Osborne-Crozier Gathering

I have posted before about how the Osbornes loved to have big family gatherings. This picture is from about 1924. The photo label on the back says that it was developed in Pomona, but it could have been taken at a number of locations. Most likely is Aunt Alma and Uncle Ed's house in South Pasadena, since theirs was by far the largest home, and they did love to host family parties. I resisted the urge to crop the picture to center it more, since the original shows the wonderful old car parked to the left. Perhaps one of the car buffs out there can identify it for me. 

The ages of the children helped me figure out when the picture was taken, since this is one of the MANY photos I have that remain unlabeled. I can easily identify the children:

Front row from left: George Edgar (Bud) Arnold, Dormel Arnold, Joseph Osborne (my Uncle Bud) Crozier, Margaret Maria (Jane) Major, Margaret Julia Crozier (my mom), Charles Russell (Russ) Crozier, Mary Margaret Crozier

Some of the adults were a bit more challenging, but here are they are as best I can figure:

Back row from left: Dorthy Grier Arnold, Gladys?, Georgia Osborne Major, Great-grandma Maggie Lucy Long Osborne, Margaret (Pearl) Osborne Page, Margaret (Maggie) Roberts, ?, Alma Osborne Grier, Julia Osborne Crozier (my grandma), Mary Clementine (Clem) White Crozier

As I was trying to identify the adults, I had a bit of a "Eureka!" moment: I have been trying for years to identify the rather large woman with the glasses and mountainous bosom who is in the center of the back row. She appears in many of these family gathering photos, but I couldn't figure out who she was. Yesterday it hit me. She's Maggie Roberts, daughter of my great-great-aunt Julia Long Roberts. Maggie shows up in photos I have of the Roberts family in Colorado, and she looks like quite a character in those pictures. That's Maggie front and center seated amongst family and friends on a picnic in the Colorado Rockies.

I had always wondered why Maggie wasn't a part of these family gatherings, since my great-grandmother Lucy was very close to her sister, Maggie Roberts's mom, and I knew that Maggie had ended up in Los Angeles too. Two mysteries solved (who was that woman in the glasses and was Maggie in touch with the Los Angeles part of the family). All it took was a bit of obsessive poring over old family photos for a few years!

In the case of another mystery I've been trying to solve—who the heck is Gladys?—I now have proof that she was still a part of the family in 1924. Up until now, the only pictures I have of the mysterious Gladys are from around 1920. What makes Gladys a mystery is that she is listed in the 1920 census as being a daughter in the Grier household, the same age as my mom's cousin Dorthy Grier. She's not listed as a part of that family in any other census, and I don't have any memory of my mom mentioning Gladys. It's clear from the few pictures I have of her that she and Dot were best of buddies, however. One of these days I expect to have my "Eureka" moment regarding the lovely Gladys. Until then..

Gladys and Dot, circa 1920

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Thinking of My Mom on Mother’s Day

Mom after a Recital circa 1932

Grandma Crozier and Mom 1914

My mother, Margaret Julia Crozier McClellan, was born on April 16, 1914. From the day she was born, she was everybody’s darling—partly because of the fact that she was Grandma Osborne first grandchild, and partly because she was born to be doted on. I imagine that sparkling, almost too bright personality shone from a very early age. She was a smart, outgoing, and affectionate child, and that must have delighted her large extended family.

Mom and Her Much Adored Brother, Bud

By age six, she was playing the piano, no doubt impressing her music-loving family beyond words with her amazing talent. That was Mom’s thing. She played at family gatherings, she played at recitals, she played at school commencements, she played at church, and she even played at a tearoom in South Pasadena while she was in Junior College. Everyone thought my mom was destined to be a concert pianist some day, and part of her wanted to grab that brass ring too.

Mom and Dad
 June 6, 1937

At seventeen, my mother met my father, Graydon Elmo McClellan, at a church conference at Occidental College in Los Angeles. They fell deeply in love. Theirs was not an easy relationship—ever—given the differences in their temperaments. My mother was an extravert, my father an introvert. My mother was spontaneous and effusive; my father was thoughtful and cautious. My mother loved the world; my father studied it. Despite the ups and downs of their six-year courtship, they found they couldn’t live without each other; they married on June 6, 1937.

My mother never stopped playing her beloved piano, though, and my father encouraged her to continue. It was one of the things he loved the most about her, her ability to express beauty, joy, sorrow, and longing through her interpretation of Chopin, Bach, Rachmaninoff, and Brahms.

Mom with Joel
circa 1945

Roger
circa 1945

In 1940, my mother gave birth to her first child, my brother Joel. Oh, how she loved being a mother to that beautiful little boy! She read to him, sang to him, dressed him in the latest little boy fashions, and recorded every word he spoke—at least for the first eighteen months.

In 1943, my brother Roger was born. Talk about a mother’s love! Mom was positive that Roger was a loving and compassionate little boy, and she wrote that he was going to make a wonderful father some day (my mom was also psychic!). When my father was stationed overseas as a chaplain in the Army, my mother wrote lovingly of Joel’s and Roger’s cute actions and precocious sayings.

Johnny
circa 1949

In 1947, my mother gave birth to her third son, my brother John. An adorable little towhead with a sweet smile, Johnny captured my mother’s heart. I suspect that from Day 1 she plotted to make sure that this one would carry on her musical legacy (another example of Mom’s psychic abilities). By this time, my parents were settled in Santa Rosa, California, where my father was the pastor of a Presbyterian Church. Mom was busy with her three rambunctious boys, but still she played and sang, at home, at church, at family gatherings, at weddings and funerals.

Mom and Me
circa 1951

In 1950, I was born—the last child and the only girl. My mother loved us all equally, and she made sure that we knew it, but she was delighted to have a little girl to dress up (oh, those bonnets!) and dream for. Years later, Mom told me that when she held me in her arms right after my birth, she dreamed that some day I would be loved by someone as much as Mom was loved by Dad.

I remember growing up surrounded by my mother’s music. She would rock me at night and sing lullabies. She would play musical requests to get me to go to sleep (Debussy’s “Cakewalk” was my favorite). She would serenade me with hymns, folk songs, German lieder, and showtunes. She taught me to sing as soon as I could speak. She had great dreams of grooming me to be her little soprano skylark, although I realized eventually that I was more of a “car karaoke” singer; singing was always a joyful thing for me, but I never had the drive or desire to try to make it into something else. Mom being mom, though, held on to that dream far longer than common sense would suggest was wise.

Mom at the Organ, Madison Avenue
Presbyterian Church, circa 1963

When I was seven, Mom went back to full-time work as a music teacher in the Los Angeles school system. When our family moved across country, she continued to work outside the home—as assistant organist and children’s choir director at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York and as a public school music teacher in Washington, DC, among other jobs. She continued to play and sing, at home, at weddings, at funerals, and at family gatherings. She played piano to my brother Johnny’s cello (yes, her plans for him were paying off), and she and I sang showtunes together, even when we were barely speaking during my teenage years.

When I was in my late twenties, just testing the new waters of feminism, I remember quizzing my mother about any regrets she might have over giving up her career as a concert pianist. Her reaction was typical Margaret. She hadn’t given up her dream at all, as far as she was concerned. She had wanted to be a mother more than anything, and she knew that she would have had to sacrifice so much for a life as a full-time professional musician. With the life she had lived, she was able to combine her loves in a truly meaningful way. She had a husband she loved beyond words, children whom she adored, and a life with music woven through it like a leitmotif. Being a mother wasn’t settling for less at all; it was a gift that enriched her life in ways she couldn’t even have imagined when she was a young girl dreaming of being a happy wife and mother.

Mom and Me at the Steinway
circa 1998

My relationship with my mother wasn’t always easy. We were both strong-willed women who didn’t give up or in easily. Both of us were intent on having our way, which led to a great deal of strife between us when I was rushing through my teen years on my way to adulthood. Somehow through all of this, though, we found our ways to communicate our deepest thoughts and express the love we felt for each other. In later years, Mom and I found a happy rhythm when we were together. Whenever too much talk endangered that happy rhythm, we always had music to fall back on.

Mom's music became a happy part of our expanding family as my brothers married and had children of their own. Mom's particular brand of love was passed along to her grandchildren and eventually to her great-grandchildren. She delighted in the visits of her somewhat scattered family. After my father passed away in 1994, Mom took it upon herself to hop on planes and go see her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. She flew from Medford, Oregon, where she and Dad had moved into a retirement community, to San Francisco, Boston, North Carolina, and Switzerland. 

Mom in Paris circa 2000

One of my fondest memories is of flying with my mom to Switzerland in 2005 for my nephew Ian's wedding. Mom kept announcing to anyone who would listen that she was ninety-one-years old and she was traveling across the world to see her grandson get married. Needless to say, we were treated like queens everywhere we went, from the flights to the checkins at various hotels to the restaurants where we had "the best meals ever." Mom's suitcase never quite caught up with her, which she used as an excuse to shop for new clothes and then announce to everyone at the wedding that she'd bought what she was wearing in the most darling little shop in town.

Mom at Her 90th Birthday Gathering

A couple of years before Mom died, I moved to the Medford, Oregon, area to be closer to her. What a wonderful decision that was. We had so much fun together, partly because I had come to see my mother as more than just my mom; I saw her as someone who had an indomitable spirit and an endless supply of delight in everything around her—big and small. “Oh, the trees are so beautiful!” she’d say as we drove from Medford to Jacksonville to eat at her favorite restaurant, the Jacksonville Inn. “Oh, what a pretty blouse!” she’d say when I showed up at her apartment in something other than a T-shirt. “I’m so blessed!” she’d say when her children and grandchildren visited her. “Isn’t this the best ice cream?” she’d say, taking a spoonful of Umpqua Vanilla Bean.

When she had to move from her upstairs two-bedroom apartment to a first-floor one-bedroom assisted living apartment in Rogue Valley Manor, the retirement community she and my dad had moved to in their late seventies, she just kept going on and on about the fact that she still had a lovely view of the Rogue Valley and, even more important, her beloved Steinway fit in the living room perfectly!

Mom with Great-grandkids Lucy and Asa McClellan
August 2009

Mom had a massive stroke in July 2009, at the age of 95. I got a phone call the morning that it happened, telling me that she had been taken to Rogue Valley Medical Center. I quickly drove to the hospital, and when I walked into the small room in Emergency, there was my mother lying on a gurney. Mom looked up, saw me, said, “Hello, darling,” and burst into “The Sound of Music,” one of our favorite songs to sing together. I of course joined in, since that was clearly what was required. The emergency staff stared at us in amazement, given the fact that Mom had had a massive brain hemorrhage and they didn’t expect her to live more than a few hours, perhaps days. I’m not sure they’d ever seen anything quite like that little impromptu musical duet!

Mom lived another six weeks. As her grasp of reality drifted away bit by bit, she still managed to find joy in the people who cared for her in the Health Center at RVM. She found joy in the music we’d play for her on a little portable CD player. And she began finding joy in the world beyond this one. Mom would see things I couldn’t, and she would exclaim with delight in what she saw, grasping at something above her bed, as if trying to catch the hand reaching down to her from heaven.

In the last week of my mother’s life, I took her upstairs to her apartment, thinking she might want to see it again, to say goodbye. I wheeled her up to the piano, since she showed interest in it. Mom placed her lovely piano hands down on the keys and started playing one of her favorite Chopin nocturnes. Mom was channeling that endless well of musical memory, as she rocked back and forth with the emotion that Chopin triggered in her. I can’t help but think, as I look back on this astonishing memory, that this must be what the composer had in mind as he wrote down those notes for others to play.

Mom died in her sleep on August 27, 2009. I miss her every day, but I also know that she will always be with me. I think of all that my mother taught me. She taught me to seize the day, to bask in the joy of life’s surprises, big and small. She taught me to sing loudly and with feeling, even if other people turn around and stare at you. She taught me to tell people that I love them, to praise them for efforts, to let them know that I think they are special. She taught me to be a strong woman even in the face of a frightening sense of vulnerability. Most of all, she taught me that a mother’s love is unbreakable, no matter what. The hills are indeed alive with the sound of music, Mom. Thank you for helping me to see that. Happy Mother’s Day.

A Protestant Chaplain

My father, Graydon E. McClellan, was a chaplain in the Army during World War II, serving from June 1944-June 1946. Most of his time was spent in the European Theater. One of the reasons my father entered the Army was that he had read about what Hitler was doing to the Jews, about the trains full of people on their way to the Work Camps and the Death Camps. My father was a pacifist, believing that there were other ways to solve the problems of this world than the taking up of arms; he had actually applied for conscientious objector status at one point.  But the brutality of the Nazis and the Hitler regime shook his beliefs. Regardless of his commitment to peaceful solutions, despite his deferment as an ordained minister, Dad joined the Army, first attending Chaplain School at Harvard, then being sent to Camp Hulen in Blessing, Texas, as part of the 558th Battalion, and finally being shipped with his unit to England, then the Netherlands, and eventually Germany.

During the time Dad was stationed in Bayreuth, Germany (July-September1945), his new commanding officer, Lt. Col. Sack, who was Jewish and a lawyer from Philadelphia in civilian life, took Dad into town to meet children and adult survivors of the Eastern Nazi camps, who were passing through town on the UNRA “displaced persons” route from the East to “uncertain destinations.”

I have pictures of my father and these survivors that were taken that day. Until I got the story behind them, I was always puzzled by the way the adults and children look. They look well-fed for the most part, wearing clean clothes, as they gather around my father in his Army Captain’s uniform, smiling at the camera. The photos are such a contrast to the usual camp survivors pictures—emaciated adults and children with sunken eyes, dressed in prison camp striped pajamas. It was only when I realized that the people in my father’s pictures had been liberated from the camps five months before that I understood. They had been fed and given clean clothes. They had been, for the most part, treated kindly by the Allied troops who had liberated them and the relief groups who tended to their immediate needs. Behind those smiling faces, though, were the nightmarish memories of torture, humiliation, and depravation at the hands of the Nazis and the fear of a future of homelessness, being moved from one place to another in search of a permanent place to begin a new life.

The blond boy on my father's lap was saved
when a gentile Ukranian said the boy was his own.

The girl on the right, Helenka, was saved on the brink of the gas chamber,
due to a flippant, and courageous, remark to a Nazi Guard

A few years ago, I found an article my father had written about that encounter and submitted to Life magazine in September 1945. The article was titled “Did Hitler Win?” The provoking title was my father’s way of startling people into the realization that the war wasn’t truly over as long as the thousands of survivors of Hitler’s relentless persecution remained homeless. Perhaps because of modesty, perhaps because of Army regulations, my father used the byline "By a Protestant Chaplain."

My father was shocked at his own country’s resistance to taking in these “displaced persons”—a term that seemed euphemistic to my father, given how they had come to be “displaced"—as well as that of other countries. In the article, my father writes about the refugees he met. Dad spent the day listening to their stories, later attempting to summarize their individual experiences in the article, hoping to put  names and faces on this humanitarian crisis. Dad listened as they shared their stories of the horrors of the camps. In the article, he personalizes the story of these Jewish survivors by talking about various individuals: Helenka, Vergina, Felix, the “Jewish chaplain’s brother,” Widow Lair, Leon, and Maria. He also mentions Dr. Paul Heller “whom I met later that day.” Dad writes “How I loved the man!” but then crosses it out, probably because he felt it was too personal for an article.*

My father was trying to bring to light the miserable uncertainty the surviving Jews faced in trying to find a home. Dad submitted the article to Life Magazine in September 1945, but he received a rejection letter. In the letter, the editors of Life point out that they’ve already covered the horrors of the concentration camps in previous issues, completely ignoring the point of my father’s article, which is “How can we turn our backs on these homeless refugees now, after all they’ve been through?”

The article ends with the “Buchenwald Song,” in English translation. The lyrics were written by Fritz Löhner-Beda, a Viennese satirist, who was himself imprisoned in Buchenwald and later deported to Auschwitz, where he died in the ovens. The melody was composed by Hermann Leopoldi, another Austrian Jew imprisoned in Buchenwald; Leopoldi later managed to escape the camp, thanks to a large bribe arranged by his wife, and he emigrated to the United States.

My Father' Notes on the Origins of the Buchenwald Song

While the song was commissioned by the Nazi commandant for the camp, and the prisoners were forced to sing it over and over for the amusement of their captors, the Jewish prisoners made it their song. As Buchenwald prisoner Robert Siewert later recalled, “When we sang it, we always put all our hatred and conviction into it.” [The Undying Flame: Ballads and Songs of the Holocaust, edited by Jerry Silverman, Syracuse University Press, 2001; p. 15]

Channeling their bitter sorrow and anger into their singing of the song, the prisoners often put a special emphasis on the word free in the last line of the chorus.

O Buchenwald, I cannot forget you

Because you are my fate.

Only he who left you knows how wonderful liberty is.

Yet, Buchenwald, we don’t lament and complain;

And whatever may be our future

We shall say “yes” to life,

For there will arrive the day when we shall be free.

The above translation was done by Maria (last name unknown), one of the people mentioned in my father’s article. My father refers to Maria in a later letter to my mother, dated October 13, 1945: “When we came down from C battery day before yesterday, we brought Maria down to Degendorf, about sixty miles down from the river, where she is going to try to get help to get into Czech. to find her grandmother, the only one of her family left. She had finished the translating for me and she had also written down the words and the music of the Buchenwald song. She wrote down the melody herself and tried it on the piano and said it sounded right. I can’t vouch for it. I gave her $10 (equal to $40 for her) and some cigarettes for the translating. I also gave her the trench coat I got [in] Albuquerque, for she had no coat. It had shrunk rather badly, and Col. Sack had given me an unlined trench coat anyway.”

While the perspective of the article my father wrote—“Did Hitler Win?”—is Christian-centric, and some of the language a bit dated sounding, my father’s compassion for the people he is writing about and his righteous indignation against the Allies’ failure to respond by opening their doors resonate today, as we once again deal with a humanitarian crisis of refugees being turned away rather than being offered sanctuary.

After the war, my father spent the rest of his life studying and writing about the Holocaust. He never forgot the stories of the brave survivors he met that day in Bayreuth in 1945, and he was deeply committed to trying to make sure that others never forgot.

Below is a draft of the article my father submitted to Life. The handwritten edits were incorporated in the final version.

*Dr. Paul Heller is indeed another story, which I will write about another time. Dr. Heller survived not only Auschwitz and Buchenwald but the limbo of life as a displaced person in post-war Germany.  He managed to find entry into the United States, where he became a well-respected doctor in Chicago. His story is beautifully told in his daughter Caroline Heller's book Reading Claudius: A Memoir in Two Parts.

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Claudius-Memoir-Two-Parts/dp/0385337612?ie=UTF8&keywords=reading%20claudius&qid=1462513879&ref_=sr_1_1&refinements=p_n_feature_browse-bin%3A2656020011&s=books&sr=1-1

Margaret Elizabeth "Pearl" Osborne Page (1879-1943)

Pearl circa 1910

My great-aunt Margaret Elizabeth Osborne was known as Pearl. My mother absolutely adored her Aunt Pearl and talked about her all the time. Evidently the love was mutual; by all accounts, Pearl, who had no children, doted on her nieces and nephews and celebrated every little triumph in their lives and commiserated with them over every little tragedy. Pearl was also very generous. I suspect that my mother was able to have the wedding of her dreams thanks to Aunt Pearl, and I know that Pearl slipped my parents the occasional cash gift when they were struggling newlyweds.

Margaret Elizabeth Osborne,
circa 1880

Margaret Elizabeth was born in Laramie, Wyoming, on November 3, 1879. She was the first child born to my great-grandparents Maggie and Mac Osborne. She had a built-in big sister in Alma, Mac’s daughter from his first marriage. Pearl’s was followed by that of her two little 

From left clockwise: Julia, Pearl, Alma,
Georgia Osborne, circa 1890

sisters—my grandmother Julia Ella Osborne in 1881 and my great-aunt Georgia McDowell Osborne in 1885. Pearl’s dad Mac died tragically in a railroad accident right before Georgia was born. Soon after Mac’s death, Maggie, still pregnant with Georgia, moved the family to Silver Plume, Colorado, where Maggie’s mother and sister were living. Eventually the family moved to Los Angeles to start a new life.

As I’ve written before, the Osborne sisters were extremely close throughout their lives. They all married but continued to live close to each other—all the better for the many joyous family gatherings, usually at Alma’s house.

Maggie Osborne, Pearl and Ralph Page,
circa 1925

Pearl married Ralph Page in 1916 when she was 37. I don’t know much about their relationship, but from what I know about Uncle Ralph, I’m not sure he made Pearl very happy. He was known to have a roving eye—particularly for the young girls—which must have been a terrible trial for Pearl. I have no doubt that she knew. Perhaps I’m imagining it, but in the later pictures of Pearl, I see a tinge of sadness, like a passing shadow on a sunny day. She certainly never let on anything about what burdens she might have carried. Her letters to my mom, as the years went by and my physical distance intervened, are filled with expressions of love for her family and an abiding faith in God’s blessings in her life.

Pearl died of breast cancer on July 3, 1943. I’m sure the family mourned deeply at the loss of their beautiful sister and aunt. I think the world was a better place for her having been in it for 63+ years, my dear Aunt Pearl of the sweet countenance.