My Trails into the Past

Many years ago, when I first started working on researching my family story, one of my aunts (I can’t remember which one – perhaps Aunt Lorene Waldron) sent me the Gleeson photo album. Oh, what a treasure it is. It is leather-bound with photos, mostly photo cards, inserted into pages. Each photo is numbered and there is an index in the front to write who is in each photo. It was so exciting to pursue the album until I realized that the identifier listed people in relationship to themselves. Who was the scribe? My aunt had told me the album belonged to Muriel Gilbert, the daughter of Mary Martha Gleeson and Warren E. Gilbert. She never married and pre-deceased her mother by six years. Since Martha lived in a rest home in her later years, it is likely the album ended up in one of her niece’s hands. My guess would be Margaret Patterson, who was single and had written a story of the Patterson genealogy many years ago. Perhaps Margaret had then passed it on to either my Aunt Lorene, Virgini...