Gertrude had a baby brother?

Receiving loads of old papers and photos has been a godsend for me as a family historian, but sometimes they come in like a tsunami and I don’t have time to properly pore over everything before I must turn my attention back to work and the rest of my life. So it was with me and a couple of boxes of family-history-related items I brought back with me from my grandmother’s house after talking with her for several hours about family history. Normally I would have taken months to go through every last tidbit I brought back, but before I had a chance to do that I travelled to my grandmother’s home town (Wadena, Minnesota) for 10 days and I came back with enough data and scans to occupy me for a couple of years.

Among the items I brought back from my visit with Harriet were a number of photos and written notes that Harriet herself had inherited from her aunt Eva (Scott) Martes, who died on November 22, 2006. Eva was the younger sister of my great-grandmother Gertrude (Scott) Askew (1897–1980). I had time to scan a few hundred photos and sheets of notes before I had to set the project aside to prepare for my Wadena visit. Continue reading

A reunion of the McAllister sisters

I recently found two copies of a photo that I’d like to share with you. This photo captures the reunion of the McAllister sisters in their later years. These sisters are among the thirteen children born in Ontario, Canada, to George McAllister, a frontiersman who immigrated from Glasgow, Scotland, and Mary Gordon, from Donegal, Ireland. The McAllister girls grew up as poor, hard-working women, and difficulty of their lives comes across in this photo, despite their brave comportment.

One of these sisters (second from the right in the back row), Margret (McAllister) Scott (1872–1910), is my great-great-grandmother, the first wife of Frank Scott (1869–1937). Margret died a month before her eldest daughter (my great-grandmother, Gertrude (Scott) Askew) turned 13, so memories of her in my family are very faint. These photos of her and her sisters are two of only three photos I’ve so far seen of her.

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