Great Aunt Molly

I love this cabinet card of my great aunt Molly. When I scanned it into Photoshop and enlarged it on screen, I could see that the photographer had lengthened her already long lashes. This must have been done using a very fine-tipped brush and a magnifying glass.
My dad remembers Molly as “beautiful but bossy.” As he explains it: “She was the only one of my aunties that ever took lumber to me.”
Molly was the fifth of my grandmother’s six sisters and six brothers. The eldest, Emily, was born 24 years before my grandmother so Nana had nieces and nephews older than she was. I can’t imagine bringing up thirteen children, let alone giving birth to them – and my great-grandmother Eliza Ivermee was less that five feet tall too! There were so many children in the house there weren’t enough chairs to go around, so the rule was that you stood to eat until you got a job. No wonder most of them – including Molly – immigrated to Canada.