Worship: Margot Was Not a Methodist ~ 52 Ancestors #13

... 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.

Technology: George Lysle Had an Early Telephone ~ 52 Ancestors #12

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.

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.

Achievement: Margot Wins Able Youth Award ~ 52 Ancestors #11

In 1952, my mother, a senior in high school, took an achievement test sponsored by the Civic Club of Allegheny County (Pennsylvania), the Exceptionally Able Youth Spring Competition.

This is a case where I'm glad I have the original newspaper clippings; they scanned better than the images I found on my favorite subscription newspaper website.

Margot Copeland, of Allison Park, won first place in this achievement test. My grandfather noted the date of this Pittsburgh Press article.

 

Tied for second place were John Trimble and Hugh Pendleton. Suzanne Collins came in fourth.

And here is another photo from the May 29, 1952, Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph of the top four winners.

Language: Dutch, German, French ~ 52 Ancestors #10

Most of my ancestors came from England, Scotland, and Ireland, so their original language was English. However, If I go back far enough in my family tree, I do have some ancestors who came from other locations in Europe.

My sixth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Wendell was born in August 1704 in the Colony of New York to Abraham Wendell and Catharina De Kalj / DeKay. (She was baptized in the Reformed Dutch Church of New Amsterdam on August 20, 1704.) Three of her four grandparents were born in New Amsterdam, New Netherlands, which is what New York City was known as from 1653 to 1664.

I have not researched this branch of my family tree in a long time. My tree in Family Tree Maker has several holes in Elizabeth Wendell's ancestry.

Screenshot Elizabeth Wendell's ancestors in Family Tree Maker

However, others have researched this branch and shared their research in the FamilySearch family tree.  (It is important to note that this is a crowd-sourced, open family tree that can be edited by anyone with a FamilySearch account. I have not verified any of the ancestral links in these generations.)