My Great Aunt Margaret, a teacher

 For this week's topic - Education - I've chosen to share about one of my favorite people in my family. 

Great Aunt Margaret was my grandmother's sister, who never married and taught Junion High School Mathematics and Home Ec. almost all her life.

She was the youngest of the 4 daughters, Mozelle (my grandmother,) Rowena, and Dorothy came before her. They had been born in San Antonio, Texas, where their father called home as a railroad conductor...and their mother made a house into a home. 

Margaret was born on January 10, 1909 in Smithville, Bastrop County, Texas, a small town on the Colorado River (the one in Texas). I can only guess the family moved there because the railroad told the father that's where the work was. On the 1910 Census for Smithville, the family next door had the father also being a railroad worker.

By the time she was 11 the family had moved back to San Antonio in the 1920 Census, but my grandmother had married and left the family home. In the next census (1930) the three remaining daughters lived with their parents still but in the home that would be the parents' for the rest of their lives, 111 Davis Court. 

As my grandmother's first husband died in 1919 she was living with her husband's brother for the 1920 census. Then my grandmother remarried and then he died also, so my mother was back in "Grandma's House."

This photo is dated 1925, but I think my mother is a bit younger than 8 at that time. She's standing next to her grandmother.

Here my grandmother is, dressed up, and my mother dated 1924, when she would have been 7.

OK, back to Aunt Margaret!

In 1927 she was dressed fashionably for the times.  I would imagine by then she was teaching at the Jr. High School.

After my great grandmother (her mother) died Jan. 1, 1936, my great grandfather Charles Herman Miller, took Aunts Margaret and Dorothy in August for a trip by ship to Cuba and back. I tried to get a screenshot of the manifest, but my computer saved them in la la land!

Anyway, for the 1940 census Great Grandpa Charles was living with my grandmother (after my mother had married in 36) and Dorothy and Margaret...still on Davis Court. 

Great grandpa Charles died in 1946, after I'd been born in 42. But I never heard that he saw me, nor were there any photos in my family albums of him.

Aunt Margaret retired at some point. I last visited her on one of my cross-country treks in the 70s. It's a good thing I had a camper van, because her tiny one bedroom apartment couldn't have squeezed myself and my two sons on one trip, nor myself and my teacher boyfriend on another.

I had stayed in touch with Aunt Margaret through the years, sometimes sending photos of my family with Christmas cards.  She died June. 22, 1980.

I loved her open and positive disposition, always listening to others, answering questions truthfully! 

She had kept a few documents about the family, which she showed me. At the time I didn't take photos of the clippings, and so I only remembered one. But I've since been able to locate the information it contained. It was about my great grandmother's father who was killed in a shoot-out, and apparently the killer never was tried for that murder, but he was tried for another one.

But that will have to wait till there's a topic that talks about gunfights in Texas. Right!