My maternal grandma was Doris. I haven't seen that at all these days. I had a lot of maternal great aunts who were more like aunts in my life: Gladys, Merle, Dorothy, Lillias, Blanche, Beryl, Neita, Daphne, Gloria
@chiasm@ottaross@skatem@Shanitoba Here's Doris. Sadly, my mother never knew her because she died only days after giving birth to her one and only child.
@chiasm@ottaross@skatem@Shanitoba She experienced a rare form of eclampsia that caused a series of grand mal seizures - totally treatable these days but in a 1947 country town hospital in Australia, not something that was known, apparently. She couldn't work prior to getting married because of the hormone-related seizures that pregnancy made fatal. (Sorry for the downer on the otherwise fun thread, but it's something not well-known in these times)
I would've liked to meet her. My Mum was given to one of Doris' sisters to look after and my Grandfather returned to his seasonal work as a type of cowboy in the outback. My Mum never saw much of him from then on. I met his twice before he died.
@Aussiemandias@chiasm@skatem@Shanitoba Doris is pretty scarce - I knew an adult with the name as a kid, and a girl a bit older than me as a kid but haven't seen it since.
@ottaross@chiasm@skatem@Shanitoba My mother's middle name was Neita as a result. But I never knew their real names, at least, not until much later. The sisters all had nicknames and so we used those instead, but always 'Aunty' preceding: Nin, Dookie, Did, Dot etc.
@skatem@chiasm@Shanitoba@ottaross I often wish I'd sat down with the older folk, who are all gone now, and recorded them telling their stories. Imagine what your Aunt Doris could have told us.
@ottaross@skatem@Aussiemandias@Shanitoba I asked my grandmother when I was 12 and doing badges, to write me a letter describing her life when she was 12. She wouldn't have done it but it was for some badge, so she wrote me about growing up in a mining town in the far west before WWI. It is one of my treasures.
I also had a grandma Lempi who immigrated from Finland. Not sure if that's a common name over there still, or it's the equivalent of a old-tyme name there.
@jaybaltz I can only come up with one name from the greats, and it's a Louise. Would have to dig to find the others. Goldie's a winner - would've been popular in Yukon country. :)
@ottaross I think that even back then, Marcelle was not a very common name. People often thought that it was Marcel, as in her husband's name! My grandpa was called Anselme though, and I still kinda like it!
@ottaross I wonder how she did it. Her family didn't approve of her going and they didn't have money so presumably scholarships. Her university was in London and they were evacuated to Oxford during the blitz so she finished her degree at Oxford.
@ottaross She taught for a few years before marrying. They had 4 kids and then moved to Canada for her husband's (my grandfather's) job. He died after only one year in Canada so she went back to school and got her master's in library sciences and then she helped to set up the library at the university her husband worked at before he died (the university merged with 2 other colleges so they needed a new library). And then she worked at the university library until she retired.
@mariellequinton Nice - does that library have a patron's name today? You should lobby them to name it after her - there couldn't have been many degreed ladies setting up libraries around then.
@ottaross lol. That would be such a great project. Going around attaching plaques to various buildings to recognise the uncredited women who contributed to the institution.
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