Another Christmas Past?

Another Christmas Past?

Happy New Year, 2013.  I have now "celebrated" 50 New Year's celebrations and 50 days of Christmas. During the last couple of months, I have spent much time reminiscing with the ghosts of my Christmases past. Last year in my Advent Calendar of Christmas memories I shared many of my favorite stories and thanks to this blog, I am able to go back and read them again. While doing so, I couldn't help but remember some of the joy and anticipation I was feeling during those early Christmas times. The scent of the Christmas tree, the colored lights shining behind the white curtains in our living room, watching the snow softly falling in the glow of the streetlights, thinking I heard Santa walking softly around my house while I pretended to be asleep, believing the red lights on the radio towers were Rudolph's nose.... 

Ah, the magic that is childhood.  How quickly it flew by.

Even at 50 years of age, I still find myself at times seeing those towers and remembering how I stood outside my house on Christmas Eve, believing that red light just might be leading Santa's sleigh through the night sky and sometimes I feel the goosebumps at the thought of what might be waiting underneath the tree.

Many of the people I spent those wonderful holidays with are no longer with me, but the memory of my loved ones is so clear in my mind that they are always here in spirit. This year I seemed to be missing those people even more than usual, so I created an Ancestor Christmas Tree and on it I placed photos of many of my ancestors and those of my husband as well.  It is a reminder of those wonderful past Christmas and New Year's Days.  I labeled the reverse of each photo so that my children and grandchildren will know their names and I plan to have the tree up again next year when my new granddaughter will be able to appreciate a Christmas tree for the first time.  It helped me hold onto a little bit of "Christmas Past".

Photograph of my great grandmother, Margaret McBride Marling, on my Ancestor Christmas Tree.

 

50 Christmases?  No. That can't possibly be true! I know it was only yesterday I was wishing for that talking doll.......

 

Happy New Year, 2013.  May it be a blessed year for us all.

Madness Monday - McBride Mystery

Margaret E. McBride was born on 4 April, 1871 in Pennsylvania to William M. McBride and Martha A. (maiden name unknown). She married Ralph Elliott Marling on 4 July, 1895 in Columbus, Ohio. She was beautiful. She had two children, Chester Wilson, born on 17 December, 1896 and Gladys Margaret (my maternal grandmother), born 2 December, 1900.

According to the 1880 US Census she was living with her parents and her brother, William, in Steubenville, Ohio. In 1900, she was living in Columbus, Ohio with her husband, son, and her parents.

She died on her birthday, 4 April, 1908. The death record states that the cause of death was heart failure. My grandmother told me that she died in childbirth. She is buried in Greenlawn Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio. She has no gravestone. It breaks my heart and someday, I hope to remedy that situation.

That is all I know of my great grandmother and her parents.
After her death, her parents do not appear on any Ohio census records. Her brother married and according to the 1910 US Census records, he was living in Braddock Borough, Allegheny County, PA with his wife, Frances, and their daughter, Edrice. He was an accounting clerk with the railroad. By 1920, his wife and two daughters were living in Columbus and Frances was a widow. Luckily, the name Edrice McBride was not a common one, and I have been able to discover information about the life of my first cousin twice removed. She married a gentleman by the name of Theodore Byrle Taylor and they had two children, both now deceased. I have been unable to contact any of her grandchildren, although I do know their names. I have photographs (thanks to findagrave.com) of her gravesite and that of her mother, Frances.

I do not know the exact date of William McBride's death, nor do I know where he is buried.

The real frustration comes in finding my great great grandparents, William and Martha McBride. A Martha McBride does appear in the Ohio census after 1900, but it is not "my" Martha. I believe they may have gone back to Pennsylvania with their son, but they did not appear to be living with him. They also may have died before the 1910 census, but I have been unable to discover them in any Ohio death records.

My grandmother knew little about them. She did know she had an "Uncle Bill" who "died young". I don't believe she knew either of her cousins, Edrice or Martha Madeline. Her father, Ralph, having two young children to raise, remarried twice. Neither woman treated my grandmother kindly, but she was quite close to her father. Her father left Columbus to work as a moulder making train wheels in Elkhart, Indiana, so she had little, if any, contact with her mother's family after her death.

Of all the "brick walls" I have run into in the past 6 years, this is the most painful. I haven't given up. I continue to try to contact my distant cousins and hopefully, someday, I will at least know where William and Martha took their final rest.