This is a hundred year old photo of my grandparents George Emery and Katherine Galvin at a costume ball in 1919 according to the writing on the back of the photo. There is a little controversy because in the photo you can clearly see that both of them are wearing wedding rings. We know that they were married in 1921 and their first child, my father, was born in November 1922 so the photo may have been taken in early 1921. Doesn't really matter. It's old.
It also shows two people in love who just survived the 1918-1919 global pandemic. They must have been courting during that national crises. Did they wear masks? You would think at a costume ball everyone would be wearing masks.
They lived in the Tioga section of Philadelphia near Broad and Erie Avenues. Her mother and her mother's sister also lived in the house with the family. There was a ground floor grocery store on Tioga Street that was owned and run by the family. It helped them get through the Great Depression.
My grandmother here in this picture died from childbirth complications after delivering her fifth child our Aunt Kate following four boys. My grandfather would marry again and have two more children and then move the family to the Germantown section of the city to a house on the corner of Greene and Logan streets across the street from the parish church. He would also die young from a ruptured brain aneurysm. My grandfather would have 34 grandchildren but would only live to meet one of them, my sister Betsy.
I never talked with an older relative about that earlier pandemic and there were a lot of them around when I was a kid. My great grandmother Ada Morris who lived with us for a number of years loved to talk to us about her life and how different things were when she was growing up. She was born in 1878, although I need to check that, and she always referred to cars as "the machines" right through to her 80's. She never said anything about the 1918 pandemic.
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