My grandmother, Elizabeth Adsit, known as Libby to everyone including her grandchildren, married Edgar Carter Rust on August 12, 1933, after divorcing my grandfather.
They had been married for 29 years when this photo was taken.
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| Elizabeth (Adsit) Rust and Edgar Carter Rust Summer 1962 |
Three years after they married, they traveled to Europe with my dad and Edgar's youngest son, Kenneth. I have a couple of photographs from this trip. This one has been enhanced and colorized by MyHeritage.
Someone in my family probably has my dad's high school yearbook, but I can see it at Ancestry's U.S., School Yearbooks, 1900-2016 database. He attended Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts, from 1937 to 1942.
The school used and still uses the British educational notations, Forms III, IV, V, and VI, though they now also refer to freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. (Form I and II, also known as seventh
and eighth grades, were dropped many years ago.)
The 1942 yearbook includes a history of the class which covers over four pages of the yearbook. Near the end of the "Sixth Form History" was this paragraph.
In recent years, my mother downsized a couple of times and had consolidated her recipes at the family summer house. When my siblings and I were emptying the kitchen for a renovation, I was given my mother's collection of recipe boxes. This week's theme prompted me to take them out of the bag and see what I have.
Here's a favorite of my mother, me, and my family, in my mother's handwriting.
SPICED PECANS
... in fact, she was never particularly religious.
After graduating from college in 1956, my mother moved to Boston where she met my father when they both worked at the Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company. Over the course of several years, they fell in love and wished to marry.
In the spring of 1963, my grandmother, Helen (Hunter) Copeland, a devoted Presbyterian, contacted several ministers in the Pittsburgh area (where she lived and where my mother grew up) to ask if they were available to marry her daughter and fiancé in the late summer or early fall of 1963. When a minister would say yes, he was available, he would begin to collect information about Helen's daughter and her intended.
At this point, Helen would let him know that the wedding would have to wait until her future son-in-law's divorce was final. According to the story, this horrified several ministers that Helen spoke with and they refused to officiate at the wedding of a woman to a man who had just been divorced. I believe some were willing to marry the couple, but told Helen that the couple had to wait a year after the divorce to marry.
My parents didn't want to wait.
Helen was able to find a young Methodist minister who was willing to marry my parents in September. My father's divorce decree was final on August 13, less than seven weeks before his wedding to my mother.
My second great-grandfather, George Lysle, was a coal merchant in Pittsburgh. A family story says that in the 1880s, George Lysle's office had one of the earliest telephones in Pittsburgh.
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| This is either George Lysle, Jr. (1845-1900) or his father George Lysle (1800-1877) |
George's daughter, Marguerite, was born in 1876 and was not quite nine years old when her mother, Marion, died in 1885. At some point in the 1880s, her father George, who was the owner of George Lysle & Sons Coal Merchants and was briefly on the Pittsburgh School Committee, had a telephone installed in his office.
Marguerite remembered visiting her father's office and seeing this new contraption and being fascinated by it and by watching her father speak into the device to another person in another location. This was a significant enough memory for her that she shared it with her granddaughter (my mother) sixty-some years later. And thirty or thirty-five years after that, my mother shared this story with me.
