Thursday, July 9, 2020

The girl from the first generation


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In my recently completed multi-generational autofictional book, The ‘Starting Out’ Years, the first story begins in 1898 in Glasgow, and actually resembles the ‘starting out’ years of my grandmother, Mattie Colquhoun.  The girls in succeeding generations in the book, including myself, become less individually recognizable and are more likely to be ‘composites’ representing more than one person.


Mattie, who was born in 1882 is pictured on the left, as she will appear on the book cover, along with the other five girls.  I have no photographs of my grandmother taken before 1904, so her school uniform is derived from the few references I was able to find on the internet.  She should probably be wearing a hat, but the hats in the internet pictures seemed awfully elaborate, so I just put a ribbon in her hair.