In the summer of 1931, family friends took 9-year-old Anne on a driving trip to Vancouver, BC, so she could spend 3 months with her mother. The 2-week trip from California was in a big old touring car, equipped with running boards full of camping gear, staying in river-side campsites on the way north. She remembers being…
In January 1931, Anne was living with Claire, who had some limited correspondence with Florence, Anne’s mother. The period from 1923 to about 1930 was quite difficult for Florence, but the detailed information is a little scant. The details are probably available in her voluminous correspondence and notes (much of which my mother still has),…
Here’s a photo of Mom’s Grade 3 class at McKinley School in Gardena (Compton) California. Mom is seated, third from the left. Her classmates were mostly children of Japanese and Mexican farm workers. Update: Due to popular demand (100% of commenters so far have requested it) I am including the Grade 4 class picture below. It…
Lying in bed this morning, I lazily checked my email on my ever-handy iPhone. Suddenly I bolted up in excitement. (The truth is that I continued to lie lazily, but my brain did perk up.) I had received by email, a blog comment from a hitherto unknown half-second-cousin-once-removed, who found my post about Charles Douglass Waddell, who happened to her great-grandfather.…
As I left off in the last post, toddler Anne was living with a foster family while her mother was in a mental hospital in British Columbia and her father was finding his way in California. (Society didn’t have the same expectations of fathers in those days.) Anne soon went to live with her mother’s older sister Vera on…
My mother’s story began in 1922. In fact it began a bit before – let’s say September 1921. That is when her parents were married. Adam, age 35, was a World War 1 veteran who, like many other vets after the war, was having trouble finding suitable employment. He was from a family of Scottish…
Some might find this to be an “inappropriate” subject. However, since I know that Mom will be logging on to her computer first thing tomorrow to read my blog, and I’ve warned her, I think it is a fine topic. This morning from her hospital bed, when I mentioned that my dribbling of lukewarm coffee was…
For 100 years, my family gossiped about the identity of my great-great-grandfather. Presumably he was named Charles Waddell, since those two names were given to the child who took his mother’s surname (B) when he was born in 1860. According to lore, the erstwhile father was an officer in the military, based at Windsor Castle where the…
Seeing Clarely 