52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: #1 Margaret Elizabeth McFarlane

Thanks to a lovely challenge from the blog No Story Too Small, I'm joining a lot of others committed to blogging about one ancestor a week during 2014. I want to also use this challenge to do more scrapbooking, so I plan to include a new heritage layout each week.

This week I present my great-aunt Peggy, whose middle name I share. My father thought of his Aunt Margaret Elizabeth McFarlane as a mother figure.

Her comfortable childhood was disrupted by her father's brain injury when she was about four years old. Leaving school early to help support the struggling family, one of her proudest moments was the day she graduated from Moody Bible Institute. She worked in a needle factory and as a telephone operator, as well as doing secretarial work for many years.

After her older sister died, she proposed to her brother-in-law that they marry, so she could help raise her niece and four nephews. He was not interested, instead marrying another woman. He died four years later, leaving the five orphans to be raised by relatives and in boarding school. Aunt Peggy stepped in to help guide and raise the children, never marrying. Her niece and nephews saw her as the nearest thing to a mother in their turbulent young lives.

Aunt Peggy never learned to drive and never owned a car, depending instead on Chicago's mass transit. Born on August 2, 1900, in Chicago, she died in a Florida retirement center on July 16, 1992.

Quick drop page, Bookshelves digital kit from ClubScrap