Flipside: Love and Marriage--My Grams and Pop Pop

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 # 18 (April 29-May 5) is Love and Marriage.

Sweethearts from day one, my paternal grandparents, George Henry Hughes and Sarah Margaret VanGilder.

The story passed down was that my Grams and her family were living in Woodlawn, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, when the Hughes family moved into town. Who ever saw and met Pop Pop first, is not known; however, when Grams first saw him, her question to her sisters was, "Who is that handsome new fellow." 😍 Both Grams and Pop Pop would have been in the fifteen-sixteen year age group.

Woodlawn, Pennsylvania
Main Street
1914

Woodlawn was the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company town. The VanGilder's moved from Morgantown, West Virginia and Mom, Jessie VanGilder, was probably running a boarding house there for steel workers. The Hughes Family had moved from the Southside of Pittsburgh where another Jones and Laughlin plant was located.

Dated 1915
Sketched by George Henry Hughes
of
Sarah Margaret VanGilder

Grams was one of four VanGilder sisters. Pop Pop had dated one of the VanGilder girls before he asked Grams out. Their dating relationship lasted while Pop Pop served in World War I with the Canadian Expeditionary Force stationed in Siberia. When he was discharged in May, 1919 the VanGilder women had moved from Woodlawn to the city of Pittsburgh. Grams and Pop Pop resumed seeing each other traveling by the P & L.E. train from Pittsburgh to Woodlawn.

On June 5, 1920, while Pop Pop's Mom and Dad were visiting family in England, Sarah and George were married in Fairmont, Marion County, West Virginia by Rev Herman Goethe Stoetzer, pastor of the Presbyterian Church. Sarah's oldest sister, Mary Louise VanGilder was a witness.

Grams and Pop lived in the Pittsburgh area, raised three children and retired to Florida in 1962. Before they left, the family met for a reunion at my parents house. Pictured above is the photograph from that day with all of the Hughes family to that date. Three more grandchildren were added.

The family celebrated Gram's and Pop Pop's fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1970.

In 1985, we visited Grams in Florida. Pop Pop had passed twelve years earlier. When my brother showed Grams the photograph of the 1960 family reunion, she exclaimed, "How I loved that man," pointing to Pop Pop.

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