Of Mothers and Grandmothers

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: Mothers’ Day

A family visit was my Mother’s Day present, so I am a bit behind with my entries. But I didn’t want to miss a tribute to generations of mothers and grandmothers, women who experienced loss yet raised their children through all kinds of travails.

First my mother, Joan Harley Macnee, who had an on-and-off again marriage raised three children then, widowed in England at 51, built a new life for herself in Australia, where she lived and continued to work for peace and social justice for almost 3 decades.

Joan, 1985

My two grandmothers, Emma Carr Macnee and Elizabeth Gilvray Harley, both of whom spent most of their adult lives without their husbands.  Emma, a spinster at home in Birmingham, England with mother and sisters at age 41 in 1901, yet married in Brooklyn, New York that same year.  A mother at 43, she left her spendthrift husband and took her son back to England a few years later.  Elizabeth, mother of four, kicked out her gadabout husband after nearly 20 years of marriage and supported herself and the children by renting out rooms in her home..

Granny Harley with three of her children, on her 70th birthday.

Elizabeth Hamilton Macnee, a paternal great-grandmother, mother of eight children, two of whom died in infancy and three more before their mother’s death, was matriarch of a 3-generation home with no husbands in sight in two census years.  

Emma Kent Gilvray, a maternal great-grandmother, married an ironmonger, raised three children, in London, then south Wales and finally Birmingham, while his business life seemed to spiral downhill.

1937 Emma Kent Gilvray, Auntie Rene with dog, Joan with Ian

Emma’s mother, Mary Joy Kent, married a gamekeeper in Dorset, moved with him to the Midlands where their three children were born, left him, and moved to London where for a while she supported herself by taking in laundry.  Then at the age of 56 she accompanied her widowed older son and his two daughters to California, where she lived on a small farm with her two granddaughters until she died at the age of 79.

Mary Joy’s mother, Elizabeth Groves, whose mariner/coast guard husband was seldom at home when the census taker called, raised six children (another died young) while following his postings around the coast of England.  

Nancy Blissett Harley died at or near the birth of her only son, who married Jane Round Harley, who then died in his thirties, leaving her with an only son.

To all these women, who met life head-on, and the many others in my ancestry about whom I know so little, a Mother’s Day tribute.  

Joan, her brother Ronnie, and Granny Harley, about 1920