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.)

Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas, dear fellow bloggers, followers and readers! I hope that all of you have a safe and peaceful Christmas, whether you are spending it with family, with friends, or alone.

In previous posts, I have mentioned the scrap albums which were either made for me, or passed down in the family. The images in this post come from a scrap book which my English grandmother made for me - probably when I was about 5 years old. I don't remember exactly when she sent it, but it contains a lot of Christmas images, so it may have been a Christmas present.

She also included lots of images of northern hemisphere winters, no doubt so that her Australian granddaughter could become familiar with them.

One thing I love about this scrap book is that I could run my finger over the pictures and feel them. The robin at the front of the stove here was cut out of a card and pasted on to the larger picture - and on a lot of pages my grandmother had built up a picture this way, making a very tactile scrap book, as well as one that is visually stimulating.

Love and hugs to you, dear fellow bloggers - see you after Christmas!

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!

My 1966 Scrap Album: Fashion Dolls etc

At my mother's house, in the bedroom I slept in when I was a teenager, I still have a cupboard with some of my things in it. Among them are several scrap books, and I realise I almost have enough scrap books to make a collection!



I have one my mother's mother made for me when I was very little - it has lots of pictures with texture, like embossed cards, cards with tinsel on them, or small pictures stuck on larger ones, so you can run your finger over them and feel them as well as see them.


I also have one I made myself when I was a bit older; one my father's mother's stepmother made (the 1905 Watson's Bay card which says The Pleasures of the Season attend thee was scanned from that); and as a family we have one of my mother's father's mother's scrap albums, with press cuttings (!!) and mementos of her time as a school student, a university student, and on the world tour where she met my great-grandfather.



The scrap book that the pictures I've scanned here come from, was made for me by my mother in 1966. We had been to England to visit her family, and shortly before we were due to leave, my mother fell down some steps in her sister's house (called Rosemary Cottage), holding my baby sister, and broke a toe.



So, my father flew back to Australia with my sister and me, while my mother travelled by ship, so her toe could heal in peace. During that voyage, Mum made this scrap book from an old Sydney telephone directory. (How did she come to have that, on a voyage back from England to Australia? And enough magazines to cut pictures out of? I don't know.)



The magazines she used were from 1964 and 1965. I don't collect fashion dolls myself - in fact, my sister and I only had one, for a short time, who stood in the middle of a record and twirled around. But I realised that there are quite a lot of photos of fashion dolls, and those of you who collect them might be interested to see them. Most likely the photos accompanied patterns for the clothes which the dolls are modelling.



I've also scanned a few other photos of kitchen utensils etc, to remind us of what was seen as desirable in those years!



Some of these I have seen in miniature (this goblet, for example) - but perhaps not as much stainless steel as a 1960s doll would like!


I have to admit too that I am not sure who all these dolls are. I think most are Barbie, but who are the others?