By Phil Egan for the Sarnia Journal
This past Hallowe’en, my beautiful little one-year-old, grandniece, Lily, was photographed dressed as a unicorn. It was a perfectly fitting outfit for such a rare, precious little gem. Through an opening in the creature’s head, Lily’s smiling face beams out at the photographer.
My nephew, Kevin and his wife, Julie chose Lily’s name without knowing that Kevin had a great, great aunt with the same first name.
I have written in the past of how “Auntie Lily” figures among my very earliest memories. I have a clear recollection, at about age four, of walking through Victoria Park (today, Veterans Park), hand-in-hand with Auntie Lily and her sister, Auntie Francis. The two ladies, both unmarried and both Bell Telephone switchboard operators in the days before automated telephones, lived together in a house on Maxwell Street.
When my brothers and I were teenagers, my father used to send us trekking over to the Old Girls’ home every week to cut their grass or shovel their snow. They were actually my Dad’s aunts – so our great aunts – and although, in retrospect, they were only in their sixties in the days when we worked on their lawns or sidewalks, they seemed very old indeed to a young adolescent boy.
An old African proverb tells us that any time an old person dies, a library burns to the ground. I am sure that Auntie Lily could have told her amateur historian grandnephew many stories that will now never be heard
Lily Rose Wigglesworth was born on June 6, 1899. She grew up in a city much different from the Sarnia we know today. The town’s population at her birth was about 7,000. The original General Hospital had just been built. Imperial Oil had only recently arrived in town. Horses and carriages constituted the standard mode of transportation.
Like me, Auntie Lily had nine brothers and sisters. Her family, like mine, had five boys and five girls. I have no idea of what her childhood was like, because I never asked. Now, I wish I had.
Her favourite expression was, “Holy tinpots!”
Auntie Lily died in Sarnia two days before her seventy-first birthday. She was born in an age when there were no automobiles, but lived to see men walk on the moon – a true “Holy tinpots” moment.
Today, it makes me sad to think that I have now told you virtually everything I know about this grand old lady who once took me by my hand at the age of four top go for a walk in Veteran’s Park.
Lily Rose Wigglesworth and Lily Mae Egan were born 119 years apart. My grandniece, Lily Mae, will, of course, never know her great, great great-aunt, Lily Rose. But she most certainly could have known a little bit about her if Lily, or any of her descendants, had recorded some of her interesting life details.