My great great grandparents,
the William Ansteads.
(Corning, California, c 1903)
The experience of being raised by a grandmother on her second marriage to a man who’d been married twice before, siring children each time, left me genealogically bewildered, but here’s what I’ve been able to patch together from a box of old photographs passed along by my mother.
My great grandparents
William and Emma Warder.
(Bruce Peninsula, c 1905)
Mom at her
Grampa Warder’s farm
near Lion’s Head.
Carl was the
first of Bert
and Margaret’s
children, then my
mother, Edna,
then Ross.
(above)
Mom and her
Aunt Elsie Warder near Lion’s Head,
circa 1918
Sisters Ida Jane
and Margaret.
Bert Warder and Margaret. (circa 1910)
Young Margaret (w/necklace) would become my maternal grandmother, the woman who raised me.
(right top)
My mother,
front and center, in what could
easily be mistaken for an out-take from The Little Rascals.
(right middle)
Mom & Ross
flanked by their
Owen Sound
cousins,
the Abbots.
(right bottom)
Probably taken in
Wiarton, Ontario,
circa 1928.
Gram’s marriage to Bert
didn’t last and when the children were grown, she trained as a teacher and taught on White Cloud Island
in Georgian Bay.
Among her pupils were Don and Dan Anderson, sons of Hugh and Olive. That’s Hugh with the pipe (above) and Gram at his side. She would remain there.
Hugh & Mom
Ross Gram & Mom
Uncle Ross
(back right) was
working in Northern
Ontario. (The
Dionne Quintuplets
pictures on the
wall suggest this
photo was taken
in the late 30’s
early 40’s)
Around this time,
my mother met my
father, Andrew
Dickson, in Toronto.
He had a Scottish
accent and was
well-mannered.
Young Edna
was impressed.
She introduced
Andrew to her mother
and Hugh who, by
now, had left White
Cloud Island and were
running a small
tourist/ fishing
business
in Meaford.
They married in July 1938 and I would be born two years later, by which time World War II had begun and my father was in England with the Canadian forces.
Mom & Gram
Carl & Bert
my mother
Hugh, White Cloud Island
my father
Carl
Edna
Ross
Her mother
liked him, too.
