The date on the back of this picture says “1919.” That’s all there is, unfortunately. I am sort of getting the hang of Ancestry.com but I keep seeing slightly different dates for births, deaths, locations, etc. I assumed this picture was of my aunt Ivy but if Ancestry is correct, she was born in 1916. My grandmother Jeanne was born in February, 1919. How could this little person be either Ivy or Jeanne, if the picture was taken in 1919?
So, turning away from questions I cannot answer, I thought I would look for information that gave me some picture of the time between when Nelson and Jean got married in England in 1913 and when they got to this picture, with a baby. My great-grandfather was a miner and mining was big in Arizona, so presumably that’s how they ended up in a place that must have been hellishly hot, compared to the Isle of Man.
Thanks to Ancestry.com, I found immigration papers, naturalization requests, and a voter registration for my great-grandmother, Jean. Ha! I guessed right! She registered to vote in 1920 and she was a Democrat.
Here’s the top of the Voter Registration page:
Here’s the screenshot that shows her name; it is at the bottom of the shot.
The registration is dated May 11, 1920. Her occupation was “Hsewife.” She was registered as a Democrat. (I know, I need to not read a lot into that. Still, I want to read more about being a Democrat in 1920. Was “unaffiliated” an option?) Her “nativity” was Scotland. And the declaration of naturalization was made by her husband, by which I assume there had to be a way to prove she had a right to vote, in this case by means of her husband’s naturalization status. Maybe?
I spent two hours assembling more information, but now it is too late for me to write about all of it. Or, I could stay up to write, but then I definitely will be mush at 8:00 am tomorrow when I have a meeting.
I will finish with this thought: it takes a steeliness of spirit to move to another country and not look back. Registering to vote, applying for naturalization, having children born in the new country – all these things signal, “there’s no going back.” Which is not the same thing as not missing the home you left. And it’s certainly not the same as thinking the new place is perfect. Yet Jean and Nelson set down roots right away in the United States and whether they said it out loud or not, they behaved in a way that said, “This is it. We’re not going back.”
And here I am, four generations later. I have lots of thoughts on this subject, but they will wait for another time.