Amy Johnson Crow has a 52 Ancestors Week blog challenge which I have decided to join. I am hoping it may help me to pinpoint someone or something that I have researched and not blogged about on Flipside. AND push me to blog about family each week in 2024. Sometimes I get lazy. 😁 Let's see how well I keep up.
Week # 23 (June 3-9) is Health. I decided to cover what was an unmentionable health topic that my paternal grandaunt, Mary Louise VanGilder Wotherspoon, suffered and died from in 1962.
Mary Louise's father died when she was ten. Her mother decided to open a boarding house for West Virginia University students in their home to make ends meet financially. Living in and helping her mother run a boarding house was a substantial portion of life for the four young VanGilder sisters.
When "Bobs" was seventeen, the family moved from the Morgantown area to a new steel mill town in Woodlawn, Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Again, the VanGilder women were engaged in running a boarding house for the steel workers.
There is also an article of Mary Louise and her Aunt Pinny vacationing in Atlantic City in 1914.
By 1920, the four VanGilder sisters and Mom, were living together in Pittsburgh. Mary Louise was employed as a stenographer for an oil company in the city.
From the few stories I have heard about Aunt Bobs, she was a fun loving gal. I was told she was a flapper during the 1920's and the picture postcard from Atlantic City certainly gives a nod to that. She was the one who decided to embellish the surname VanGilder, changing it to VanGuilder.
My paternal grandmother must have been close to her oldest sister, Mary Louise, as she traveled to Fairmont, West Virginia to witness the marriage of my grandparents on June 5, 1920.
I imagine she may have met her future husband, Robert George Wotherspoon, through employment associations. He was employed as a clerk at a steel mill. My paternal grandmother, once told me how handsome he was. When visited Grams and Pop Pop in Florida in the mid 1960's, the widowed ladies gathered around him.
Mary Louise was buried in Homestead Cemetery near other Wotherspoon family members. My grandparents had already retired to Florida.
The Pittsburgh Press Wednesday, November 19, 1975 page 87 |
I do not believe that I ever met "Aunt Bobs". She lived in the Pittsburgh area while I was growing up and I was fifteen when she died. I find it odd that our paths never crossed.
Then there is the syphilis issue. I am aware of how someone gets the disease and yet I wonder how this happened to my grandmother's sister. Bob Wotherspoon never got it. Was he a carrier?
I had heard that the Wotherspoon's were practicing Christian Scientists. Penicillin was available in the mid 1940's. They chose to not use it.
This is a story that I have waiting to write due to its sensitive nature. All people involved are no long alive. It is sad that this is the ending to a vibrant lady's life.
Mary Louise VanGilder--Annual Swimsuit Edition
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