Fearless Females: Grandma Corish

To help celebrate Women's History Month Lisa at The Accidental Genealogist has posted Fearless Females 31 Prompts to Celebrate Women's History Month.

Today I'm going to post a picture of the only grandmother I know. I think I only visited her 2 or 3 times in my early years. She was my Mom's mother, remember my Mom was my second mom, I don't really think of her as a step-mother.

Grandma Mildred lived in Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. As a kid I like her house, it was like an adventure. She had an ice box and the ice man came twice a week. One small bathroom downstairs and none upstairs. We sleep in one big room upstairs on mattresses on the floor and had to use a chamber pot during the night. She had a piano and I was the only kid who could play it because I didn't pound on it like my brothers. It was the first time I had swordfish to eat and I liked it.

The thing I remember the most about her is she made these wonderful picture books for us kids for Christmas a couple of years in a row. She used those marble notebooks and she cut colored pictures out of magazine and glued them to the pages. OK you say what is so great about that. She was legally blind. I can remember spending hours looking at the pictures. They meant a lot to me as a 10 & 11 year old kid. To me they were something wonderful my grandmother made for me.



She had also made my mom two hand appliqued quilts with 30's or 40's fabrics on them. One had butterflies on a muslin background. The other one was similar but a different applique pattern but I can't remember what. The last time I saw them was when I was 11 in New York before we moved to Florida. My Mom gave them away.

The picture of Mildred above was taken in Aug of 1958. That was the last time my Mom saw her parents, after we moved to Florida there was no way for her to return and see her parents. That had to be hard on my Mom. My grandparents had other children who lived on Nantucket. My Mom was the youngest.

The apron is one my grandmother made, the butterflies are the same as the quilt. The apron was machine stitched by the butterflies were hand appliqued. The second from the right one still has the basting stitches in it.