Happy Birthday to my mom….

Mom and two girls, Easter in the 1970s

That’s me, and my sister, in handmade pinafores, with our mother, some Easter in the early 1970s.

Great-great-grandmothers

I’ve been scanning some old family photo albums that recently came into my care.  These are two of my great-great-grandmothers, Marion Glencross Bryden and Emma L. Boyer Marsh:

Marion Glencross Bryden of PA

Emma Louise Boyer Marsh, of NJ

Like a lot of nineteenth-century kids, neither woman grew up knowing her own mother.  Marion’s mother Helen Brown died at age 25, just three years after she arrived in America from Scotland.  And Emma’s mother, Elizabeth White Boyer, died in England, in childbirth (her tenth, at least).  Emma and her siblings crossed the Atlantic together, from teenagers down to three little girls and a baby (Emma was one of the little girls–she stayed close to the others, Lida and Alice, though they were raised in different homes upon arrival).

The picture of Emma is probably from the 1880s, from the context of other photos in the same album; the picture of Marion is taken very late in life, in the 1910s, by Emma’s son, E. Roy Marsh.

Thirteen Years

Thirteen years ago today, I boarded an airplane in North Carolina with a strange little newborn who weighed about 4.5 lbs, and we moved to California (Peter did too, but he drove the U-Haul). We thought it’d only be for a couple years. I’m glad we were wrong about that.

Gelato in memoriam

Gelato in memoriam, originally uploaded by pennylrichardsca.

Went out for ice cream (well, gelato) with the kids, to mark the passing of my grandmother today. She was a big ice cream fan, to the end, and it seemed like the right way to spend the afternoon. Rest in peace, Weesie.

McWay Falls

McWay Falls, originally uploaded by pennylrichardsca.

We’re home from our trip, which included a stop to see the lovely McWay Falls in Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, above. Much of the park (including the wheeled access) was damaged by the recent fires and closed to visitors, but the cove and falls were still visible from the terraces on a sunny July morning. Son woke up to his 13th birthday in a dorm suite at SFSU, and we had little chocolate lava cakes to celebrate; he got a new toy, and a t-shirt from a friend at the same conference.

The conference went fine, it was great to see old friends and meet folks I’ve “known” online for years. But I still get intensely bored with the format of conferences (sitting and listening and sitting and listening some more). As a not-so-young independent scholar, I’m not really in synch with the young academics who are there mostly to network and talk about tenure and funding and this and that, so I don’t have a lot to chat about. It was a very small conference, so there was no book display to offer refuge, either.

Also, I ran out of yarn before I ran out of need for yarn.  That’s not the conference organizers’ fault, though.

I acquired, uh, ten used CDs on the trip–but spent less than $20 total, in three shops (Amoeba, Boo Boo Records in SLO, and Streetlights in Santa Cruz).  If you’re ever in the neighborhood near the SF Amoeba Music store, the New Ganges vegetarian Indian restaurant is friendly (if maybe too insistent about suggestions), on a quiet street, and makes some mighty fine takeout (but there’s no wheelchair access I noticed, so heads up there).  And we were so ridiculously happy with our Afghan lunch from Khyber Pass in Santa Cruz that I have to mention them too.

Hannah Boyer as a young mum

I recently inherited a 19c. photo album from my grandmother’s house–it belonged to her grandparents, Emma L. Boyer and Andrew J. Marsh. Emma was the eighth of ten English children who immigrated to the US in 1864, after their mother died–but their father had died at sea on an earlier ship, and the Boyer children arrived in New York as orphans (except the youngest, a baby, who also died at sea). The older kids were young adults; the eldest, Hannah, married within the year and moved to Ontario. The younger kids were scattered to foster homes, but seem to have kept in touch into adulthood, because several of their photos are in the album, and one of their obituaries is included as a newspaper clipping, telling the whole story.

I had occasion to scan the photos of Hannah Boyer, the oldest of the Boyer children, today, to send along to her great-grandson (a lawyer, historian and writer, and a former member of the Canadian parliament, as it turns out); so I might as well post it here while I’m at it. Hannah was called “Nancy,” and the child on her lap in at least one of these is her son Freddie. Both taken in the same studio in Orillia, Ontario.

Hannah Boyer ( 1842-1928 )

These would have been taken in the 1870s, which coincidentally is the setting of the novel I’m reading just now (Sarah Canary, set in 1873).