When I saw a TV ad for Ancestry's new yearbooks feature, I decided to take advantage and try looking up some relatives. Then someone reminded me that Classmates also has thousands of yearbooks online, so I thought to check there as well.
It took some digging, but I was finally able to find my mother's high school graduation picture.
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| Class of 1947 |
My brother reminded me where she'd attended college and, after some more digging, I found those yearbooks online through the school's library.
In 1948, she's named as an officer of Crown and Scepter, an organization affiliated with the Order of the Eastern Star. Fifteen young women are listed as members, but only 13 are in the picture. I asked my siblings, but they're not sure if she's actually in the picture or not. We agree that if she IS pictured, she's the young woman on the far left.
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In 1949, she's a member of the Sigma Sigma Sigma sorority, and that's definitely her seated at the far end of the last row. It's since become more inclusive, but at the time, this sorority was for women who were training to be teachers.
So, my mother was attempting to follow in the steps of HER mother. Go to college, become a teacher, get married, settle down. She had a lot of artistic talent, dreams of something bigger, and I can only imagine how confined she must have felt. She didn't return to college in 1950.
A few years before she died, she told my older sister that she'd been married once before marrying our father, but would only say that the man's name was "Jones." While digging for pictures, I also searched for any records verifying this. I found a 1954 church record indicating transference of membership to a different church within the city. This was seven years after she graduated from high school; four years after dropping out of college. She married my father in 1955, in San Francisco, so if she actually was married previously, it had to have happened between 1949 and 1954.
Curiously, though, the church record still lists her under her maiden name. Although I'm not 100% certain, I believe tradition then was that if a woman divorced, she kept her married name. So -- was she actually married before, or not? When discussing this with my sister, we realized that she married our father in July of 1955 and my sister and brother were born in March of 1956. That's just eight months, not nine -- did they marry because "they had to"? Given that, I suggested to my sister that perhaps our mother didn't actually marry her purported first husband. Perhaps they were simply living together and she was saving face 40 years later by claiming the relationship was legally recognized.
We don't know and, unless some as-yet-elusive records emerge, we likely never will. It does give me a bit of a smile to think that, just maybe, she decided to flout conventional mores back before it was fashionable to do so.
