This week's #52Ancestors prompt is Bachelor Uncle. However, given March is Women's History Month, as pointed about by another genealogy blogger, I am following her suggestion and writing about a bachelor or maiden AUNT. (And, if Maiden Aunt is a future prompt, I'll switch it back up!)
That said when you hear "maiden aunt" what image comes to your mind? Whatever it is, there is probably something about your vision that has a negative connotation. In my family, "that" aunt is my great-grandmother's sister, Rose. There were four sisters and one baby brother, John, in their family. Older sisters Barbara and Lillie formed a natural pair; and younger sisters Rose and Margaret did, as well.
Rose, the elder by sixteen months, and Margaret seem to have been joined at the hip throughout their childhood. I'm not sure my great-grandfather Nick realized he was getting a package deal when he married Margaret, but in many photos of the young couple taken early in their marriage... there's Rose! She seems to have been a naturally "take charge" sort of person, someone others might call bossy.
Margaret developed tuberculosis, like their father before her, and, in 1916, the decision was made to leave the Midwest's great metropolis, Chicago and move west. Idaho was their destination, where Aunt Lillie had moved years prior. Nick was able to secure a position as a court reporter in Boise, and the young couple and their two oldest children left their families, and all that was familiar behind, including Aunt Rose.
Sadly, Idaho's climate didn't provide a miracle cure for Margaret and in 1928, at the age of 41, she died of the white plague, the infectious scourge of the time. In the weeks following Margaret's death Rose came out from Chicago to help with Margaret's four children – two more added since the move to Idaho – ranging in age from 6 to 17. One would hope it was grief talking, but Aunt Rose made deeply hurtful comments to her youngest niece about how her birth contributed to her mother's death, words still fresh decades later. Horrible words, by any measure, to tell a motherless child. Aunt Rose's bossiness eventually got on the wrong side of her brother-in-law's nerves – who she had known from childhood – and Nick invited her to return to Chicago.
Aunt Rose supported herself as a cook for wealthy families in the Whitefish Bay neighborhood of Milwaukee. At the age of 46, she married gardener, Dave Lonski. So, technically, Aunt Rose wasn't even a bachelor aunt! Oh, well, so I didn't follow directions. She was still a corker! When she in Idaho one thing, in particular, her nieces and nephews remembered – and were annoyed by – was how she and their father would lapse into Luxembourgish when they wanted to talk about things they didn't want the children to hear.
Unlike her beloved sister, Aunt Rose enjoyed the gift of years living until the age of 86. Photographs of Rose show a woman looking directly into the camera with a determined gaze. There is a glimmer of mischief there, as well. She may have left her sister's children with indelible, and ambivalent, memories, but there was never any doubt of her devotion to her little sister.
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| Margaret, Nick and Rose, circa 1910. |
Rose, the elder by sixteen months, and Margaret seem to have been joined at the hip throughout their childhood. I'm not sure my great-grandfather Nick realized he was getting a package deal when he married Margaret, but in many photos of the young couple taken early in their marriage... there's Rose! She seems to have been a naturally "take charge" sort of person, someone others might call bossy.
Margaret developed tuberculosis, like their father before her, and, in 1916, the decision was made to leave the Midwest's great metropolis, Chicago and move west. Idaho was their destination, where Aunt Lillie had moved years prior. Nick was able to secure a position as a court reporter in Boise, and the young couple and their two oldest children left their families, and all that was familiar behind, including Aunt Rose.
Sadly, Idaho's climate didn't provide a miracle cure for Margaret and in 1928, at the age of 41, she died of the white plague, the infectious scourge of the time. In the weeks following Margaret's death Rose came out from Chicago to help with Margaret's four children – two more added since the move to Idaho – ranging in age from 6 to 17. One would hope it was grief talking, but Aunt Rose made deeply hurtful comments to her youngest niece about how her birth contributed to her mother's death, words still fresh decades later. Horrible words, by any measure, to tell a motherless child. Aunt Rose's bossiness eventually got on the wrong side of her brother-in-law's nerves – who she had known from childhood – and Nick invited her to return to Chicago.
Aunt Rose supported herself as a cook for wealthy families in the Whitefish Bay neighborhood of Milwaukee. At the age of 46, she married gardener, Dave Lonski. So, technically, Aunt Rose wasn't even a bachelor aunt! Oh, well, so I didn't follow directions. She was still a corker! When she in Idaho one thing, in particular, her nieces and nephews remembered – and were annoyed by – was how she and their father would lapse into Luxembourgish when they wanted to talk about things they didn't want the children to hear.
Unlike her beloved sister, Aunt Rose enjoyed the gift of years living until the age of 86. Photographs of Rose show a woman looking directly into the camera with a determined gaze. There is a glimmer of mischief there, as well. She may have left her sister's children with indelible, and ambivalent, memories, but there was never any doubt of her devotion to her little sister.
*Okay, true confessions, I'm the one who started calling her "dreaded," I don't think any of her nieces or nephews ever did... or if they did, not within her earshot!
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