My Grandmother, Serena Anderson

Serena Anderson, 84

I mentioned last month that I’ve scanned in a number of pictures from my grandparents’ old photo albums. Everything I’ve put up thus far has been from my grandfather’s youth, and so I thought I’d mix things up a little bit by putting up some information on my grandmother. A great deal of the following text comes from an interview I did with my grandmother for a school English assignment. I have no idea what the project was about, but I must have put a lot of time into it based on how long the interview was. Anyway, I recently came into possession of a number of my old computer files, and I was delighted to find this conversation typed up. I’m sorry that some of my questions are a little stilted and her answers tend to ramble. I was just a kid when I did this, and I had no idea how to conduct a proper interview. I have added some recent additions and notes. You’ll find them in square brackets.

My grandmother will be 85 this August, and a lot of interesting things have happened to her: As a newborn she spent six months in a hospital, hours away from her mother, and she may have been almost adopted by her mother’s cousin. Even my grandmother is a little hazy on the details of that episode. Her father died in a logging accident before she was five years old. She spent a lot of her childhood as a pair of working eyes for a blind neighbour. She grew up very poor during the Great Depression. She gave up school at fourteen after her mother was in a car accident, and then she got a job working for seventeen cents an hour six days a week in a wool mill. Her youth was spent in a very different Canada from the one I live in today, and I think I’m rather lucky to have these stories to paint a picture of what that was like.

A Car Story from the Early 1920s

This is another photo from the collection I scanned up at my grandparents’ place two weekends ago. My grandfather thinks this photo was taken before he was born, which would date it prior to 1924. There is a small possibility that he’s the little boy second from the left whose face is in shadow, which would put the photo somewhere around 1928. Either way, it is a very old picture. Working from the assumption that it predates Murray Anderson’s birth, those would be my great uncles Bruce, Graydon, Henry and Clarence sitting on the running board, along with my eldest great aunt, Margaret. The face sticking out of the driver’s side doesn’t look much like their father, Elmore Anderson. It might be the neighbour, Mr. Monaham (who has a story of his own worth putting up here), but I think we’ll just have to leave him unidentified.

When my grandfather saw this photo, his eyes lit up, and he told me a story that has been often repeated at Anderson family gatherings for the last eighty years and more. It took place a couple of years before this photo, but that is the car, and those are (some of) the kids. This is the story: