Five Years Old!

Yesterday, 7th February, it was five years exactly from my first blog post! To celebrate, I have been thinking about a giveaway - then I read Anna-Maria's post sharing the winners of her 8th blogiversary giveaways, where she mentions legal issues .... so I am still thinking about whether to do one or not.

So, for now, I will share with you some paintings by a distant cousin of mine. Cicely Elmslie Shand was born in 1898, in Newcastle, Northumberland, in England. (She was my second cousin twice removed - my maternal grandmother's second cousin.) She painted designs for postcards and greeting cards during the 1930s. She had married a naval officer, Cecil Sheppard, at the age of 18. We don't know much about this period of her life - where she and her husband were based, for instance - but we do know that they did not have children. Cecil Sheppard would have been at sea for much of the time - perhaps she painted then. Like many professional women of the time (Georgette Heyer and Marjorie Allingham spring to mind), she worked under her maiden name.

I was lucky enough several years ago to buy some of her original paintings for cards, on ebay. 'Welcome', above, is dated 1938. 'Acceptance', below, is dated 1935.

A fan of her work has created a website showing all the cards she published. These designs are not shown - perhaps they were not all published, although I do have a card of Acceptance. She was also included in the lovely book Postcards from the Nursery, by Dawn Cope and Peter Cope (although unfortunately, the description of her family mixes up the generations,  naming her grandfather William (my great-great-grandfather John Shand's younger brother) as her father, and her father Hinton as her uncle).

To Greet You With Joy, original artwork by Cicely Elmslie Shand for a greetings card, undated.

I would like to take the opportunity of my 5th blogiversary to greet all my followers and readers with joy, and to welcome my new followers. I hope we all have lots of fun with our collections in the year to come - I enjoy sharing mine with you, and seeing and reading about yours!

Toys, original artwork for a greetings card by Cicely Elmslie Shand, 1934. Image from ebay seller apb113 (Peter Haddon); sadly, I was outbid on this painting.

Bridal Fashions

My blogging friend CM, of MyRealitty and Leftcoastmini, is going to be the Mother of the Bride this month. She invited me to take some photos of my bridal pairs - you might remember Bridezilla from the second pair, who was determined to win the game of musical chairs at the fancy dress party last year!

Several of my Erna Meyer dolls are getting married:

18th century style

1950s or early 1960s

1970s

Thinking about bridal fashions made me think of the wedding photos I have of my parents, grandparents, and earlier ancestors.

The earliest wedding photo I have is one of my great-great-grandparents. They were both Scottish, although one was born in Jamaica and they lived in India; they married in Munich, in Bavaria (Germany), in 1859.


While this bride opted for the full white silk and lace deal, her daughter, my great-grandmother, had a rather different kind of wedding. My grandmother described it like this:

“My mother was married in her best green costume to her cousin Henry Dunlop one day in 1895, with no-one knowing. She went out for the day, came home as usual; a week later her mother found a note in an empty room saying - “I have gone to America with Henry; Gracie”

Not surprisingly, I don't have any photos of the best green costume!

My grandmother (this great-grandmother's daughter, and my mother's mother) also had a slightly unconventional wedding. Neither the bride's parents, nor the bridegroom's, were present; the bride was given away by her brother. I only discovered some photos of the wedding among a distant cousin's collection inherited from my grandmother's father - my grandmother didn't keep any.


Here they are in 1927, cutting the cake - I believe the dress was pale pink.

My mother had been a bridesmaid at several weddings:

1941

ca 1945

1955

But when she herself got married in 1961, she chose a nice gingham frock for her wedding dress. Like her mother, her brother was present but not her parents, but she refused to be given away, saying she was a person not a present.

That's Mum and Dad on the right, with my godparents on the left.

Here's a photo of my father's parents on their wedding day:

Casino, NSW, Australia, 1935

I've already shown you my maternal grandfather's parents' wedding, in Calcutta in 1903:


Another white lacy wedding dress! This is my Californian great-grandmother, who married an Englishman; her father refused to attend the wedding, so only her mother was present. (Both the groom's parents had already died.)

So, two of these brides went for the white silk, satin and lace - the others were dressed in green, blue, pink and (I think) brown & white. Some were solid colours, one flowery and one check ... Really, based on my family's traditions, I could photograph any of my nicely-dressed dolls as bridal couples!

01 01 2011 - Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Ein frohes neues Jahr! Bonne Année! Godt Nyttår! Feliz Año Nuevo! Buon Anno! Gott Nytt År! Onnellista uutta vuotta! Gelukkig nieuwjaar! καλή πρωτοχρονιά! Feliz Ano Novo!

I wish you all a happy, healthy, peaceful and fulfilling new year. Our blog world has grown a lot over the last year, it seems to me, and I'm sure we'll have more new bloggers this year. It's a bit like living in a dolls house museum and art gallery that changes daily! And where many of the artists and visitors and curators become friends, and share support and inspiration. Thank you for sharing last year, and here's to another year of great things!

My new year wishes come with a page from my Australian Nana's step-mother's 1886 scrap album. My Nana did not like her step-mother, but she had kept this album and gave it to us when we were children. We loved looking through it and making pencil rubbings of the embossed pictures - and the back and front covers:


The page I've scanned has two New Year cards by S. Hildesheimer & Co (an English greeting card company), both with very traditional European images of forget-me-nots and a passion flower.

My tiny azure flowerets
Come wishing thee good cheer,
And ask for thy remembrance,
When dawns the glad NEW YEAR.

The New Year bring thee
Health and Happiness

There is also an Australian scene, showing The Lower Light, Sydney (from a Cave on Coast). This card was published by Gibbs, Shallard & Co (a Sydney company, and probably the first local printer of Australian Christmas & New Year cards). I'm sure I should know the name of the native plant depicted on it - but I can't remember it.


(I included an Australian card from this album in my 2009 Christmas post, too - it shows Watson's Bay & Gap, NSW with more native flowers.)

There are six cards in the album which have blank spaces within the design for writing in. I think they were probably sold for friends to exchange remembrances by. The two on this page show a school room (with a poor little dunce wearing donkey's ears!), and a clock tower. One is inscribed "When this you see, remember me, and bear it in your mind, Let the world be as it may, Think of me as you find." (And make of that what you may!) The other says more simply, "With best Love to Bella" (my Nana's step-mother's name was Isabella).



Happy New Year!


(I'm staying with my mother with dial-up internet only, so please forgive me if I'm a bit slow at leaving comments on your blog posts, or responding to yours.)

San Francisco, Turn of the Century

I called my blog Rebecca's Collections because I thought I might show some of my other collections here too. I have shown one of my scrap albums, and My Realitty's posts this month about her 1890s San Francisco Italianate style house have inspired me to show some of my great-grandmother Florence Mason Palmer 's first album. This album was started by her mother and continued by Florence, who went on creating scrap books and keeping newspaper cuttings during her later life. It's no wonder I'm a collector, really!

Somehow, I seem not to have photographed the cover of the scrap album, so that is something to do on my next visit to my mother. It's a couple of inches thick, and the pages are thick, good quality paper, as you may be able to see from the scans.

My great-grandmother, Florence Elizabeth Mason, was born at the Grand Hotel, San Francisco, in November 1877. Here she is in the mid-1880s:


And here are her parents, John Elliott Mason and Nellie Chapman Mason:



J. E. Mason was a civil engineer. He was born in New York, and arrived in California in the early 1870s. He and his father, and W. S. Chapman, Nellie's father, were involved in real estate and installing water supplies and irrigation in the new colonies.



With her father and mother, Florence sailed to Europe in 1889 and again in 1891.


She visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889.



Florence attended Alameda High School, from which she graduated in 1894. In the same year, she visited the California Exposition,



and was accepted into the University of California, Berkeley (you can see a photo of UC Berkeley at the turn of the century on My Realitty's blog).




Her album documents her social life more than her academic work:



Here she is with the other members of her sorority:


I don't have with me her graduation photo, but I did take photos of some of the items in her scrap book showing the graduation celebrations. I don't know if this photo of Florence was taken at that time, but it looks to me as if she's wearing a ball dress here.



After graduation, Florence and her parents sailed around the world, visiting Japan, China, the Phillipines, India, and Europe again.


During part of this voyage, Florence met and fell in love with her future husband, an English civil engineer who was then working in India, in Calcutta:


They kept their love affair and engagement secret for several years. J.E. Mason did not approve of his only daughter marrying an Englishman, so after travelling to Paris to buy her wedding gown and trousseau, Florence married Frederick Palmer in Calcutta with only her mother present.



However, with the birth of their first child, a son named after J. E. Mason, father and daughter were reconciled, and the Palmers visited the Masons in San Francisco during 1905.


Compare their clothes with those worn by mother and daughter in My Realitty's scene one afternoon in San Francisco in 1906:



For some reason, J. E. Mason travelled to Mexico over Christmas 1905. He died there on December 26, 1905. Florence and her baby were staying with her mother when this tragedy occurred.


Florence was again, or still, staying with her mother when the great earthquake struck San Francisco in April 1906. Their house on Washington Street, built only four years earlier in 1902, was not damaged by the quake or the fire which followed. A couple of years ago, I was surfing the internet and came across a diary of the earthquake - written by someone else - which mentioned the Mason house. Of course, right now I can neither find my printout, nor the website again! If I do, I'll add details.

Florence's mother, Nellie Chapman Mason, died in San Francisco in September 1916.


None of the newspaper clippings I've included here is completely accurate, with J. E. Mason's death notice stating that Florence's husband was an army surgeon (he was a civil engineer), and Nellie Chapman Mason's funeral notice giving her father's name as her husband's. Still, I wish all my ancestors had left such rich records of their lives!