Wednesday, May 5, 2010

(Not So) Wordless Wednesday - Post 101: Mrs. Marsden Law

I'm posting family photographs from my collection on Wednesdays, but they won't be wordless Wednesday posts like others do - I simply am incapable of having a wordless post.

I managed to scan about 100 family photographs in the Scanfest in January, and have converted the scanned TIF files to smaller JPGs, cropped and rotated as best I can. Many of these were "new" to my digital photograph collection.

Here is a photograph from the Carringer family collection handed down by my mother in the 1988 to 2002 time period:


Someone wrote "Mrs. Marsden Law" and "1880" (two different hands?) on the front of this card from Toronto. The card was made by S.J. Dixon, a photographer located at the corner of King and Yonge Streets in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I have no idea who Mrs. Marsden Law is - perhaps a friend or a cousin of Georgianna (Kemp) Auble, my great-grandmother.

If you are related to Mrs. Marsden Law, or know her maiden name, I would appreciate knowing those facts!

UPDATED 7 p.m.: It only took a few hours for kind genealogists to find the answer to my question above:

On Facebook, Sherry Leafgreen commented:

"Randy, There is a Edward Marsden Law who married W. Ann Wilson and they are listed in the 1881 Ontario census. She was born approximately 1842. Does she look about 40?"

And in Comments to this post, Ian Hadden noted: "I did a quick search for Mrs. Marsden Law and she may have been married to Edward Marsden Law. If this correct, they married 6 Jun 1865 in North Gwillimbury Township, Ontario. The marriage registration indicates both were living or were going to live in Bell Ewart, a small town on the shores of Lake Simcoe, about a one hour drive north of Toronto. The intersection of King St. and Yonge St. in Toronto would have been (and still is) in the heart of downtown Toronto. Hope this might help." Ian followed that up with "Sorry, forgot to add her maiden name is listed as Miss W.Ann Wilson."

So it's very likely that she is M. Ann Wilson, born about 1842. How did my great-grandmother Georgianna Kemp know her? She may have been a sister of Georgianna's step-mother, Melissa Wilson, who married James Abram Kemp on 16 November 1875 in Belle Ewart Innisfil in Ontario. Georgianna's birth mother, Mary Jane (Sovereen) Kemp, died 20 May 1874 in Middleton, Norfolk County, Ontario.

My thanks to Sherry and Ian for doing a little bit of research to help me out on this former mystery!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Randy,

I did a quick search for Mrs. Marsden Law and she may have been married to Edward Marsden Law. If this correct, they married 6 Jun 1865 in North Gwillimbury Township, Ontario. The marriage registration indicates both were living or were going to live in Bell Ewart, a small town on the shores of Lake Simcoe, about a one hour drive north of Toronto. The intersection of King St. and Yonge St. in Toronto would have been (and still is) in the heart of downtown Toronto. Hope this might help.

Unknown said...

Sorry, forgot to add her maiden name is listed as Miss W.Ann Wilson.