Today’s post will be a short one, about a formal card my great-grandmother Lucinda Tracy (Bailey) McMurry received in late June, 1926, while spending the summer at the summer house her father built. It’s also about finding yet more hidden documentation left behind by my ever-thoughtful late paternal grandmother, Dorothy Ruth (McMurry) Black, Lucinda’s daughter.
Here is the stamped envelope I found everything in:
The back side of this same envelope:
This is what the envelope originally contained when mailed from Washington, D.C.:
How wonderful—my grandmother’s original membership confirmation to the Daughters of the American Revolution!
Also contained in this envelope was a note written much later by Lucinda’s daughter and my grandmother, Dorothy Ruth (McMurry) Black. She very helpfully explained that 502 Stewart Street and 502 Edison Street were, in fact, the same place (I had previously thought that they coincidentally moved to another house with the same street number).
The note also gives some useful information about my great-grandfather’s “summer place” that he built on Eld Inlet. My grandmother took my father and I to that house in the mid-1990s and it still existed, although it was considerably enlarged. I foolishly did not take notes about where the house was and when I tried to find it again with my wife around 2012, first by land, and then in a rented boat, I wasn’t able to find it. I started to doubt that I was looking on the right inlet, but this note let me know that I was on the right track. Finding it is on my genealogical bucket list, so I welcome any clues or confirmation I can find.
The last piece of paper in this envelope was clearly intended to be associated with some other set of papers, apparently Lucinda’s application to the Order of the Eastern Star:
These two notes were apparently written at different times by my grandmother, based on the differences in handwriting and the way she signed her name, but those times may have been only a few weeks, days, or even hours apart, as they were both written on the same type of paper—the back sides of the lower half of promotional note paper printed for the Placer Title Company. My grandmother was thrifty in so many ways, having been raised in the Depression era. She would follow produce trucks to pick up vegetables that fell off, and her personal stationery appears to have been the back sides of promotional notepads she probably picked up from a business she was visiting.
Michael! Where are you finding all these “treasures”. You are one lucky genealogist. Will the DAR membership qualify for your Mayflower quest?
I am, indeed! Vernon and Dorothy were kids of the Great Depression, plus they had a respect for family history. That was a great recipe for holding onto gems like this. Most of this material went to my dad, and with his death a couple of years ago, it passed to me. It’s going to take years to go through it all, get it organized, and extract the information I can from it all. Much of the stuff is mundane but helpful, but some of the objects are too good not to share. I’ll be using this blog to share much of the fascinating and unusually helpful material I find.
Alas, both SAR and the Mayflower Society have made it clear that they can’t accept DAR/SAR memberships older than about 1990 as evidence for anything, since until the mid-1980s none of the supporting evidence was kept or copied. That’s fine by me, as I’m enjoying this quest to link myself to the Mayflower. Of course, once I’ve done this, the Mayflower Society will save the documentation I submit and then other family members on this same line *can* use my membership materials as the basis for their membership. I’ll be letting eligible family members know that once I’m past the finish line, but I’ve still got a couple of months of work ahead before I’m there, I think.