cimorene

This is a photo of my great-grandmother Sylvia, who died a few days shy of her 100th birthday about 6 years ago. She was a flapper, and this photo was what made me decide to adopt the hairstyle I wear.

She was the one who was married to the rich Russian opium smuggler who later did the whole murder-suicide thing and she's also the one who spent decades in crippling depression.

I have a lot of cool jewelry from her, through the combined circumstances of her having been a girly flapper party girl and then married to a rich older man who showered her with presents for several years before she kicked his ass to the curb and raised my grandfather alone. And I have a lot of cool stories about her too¹, because she was pretty cool. What I don't have is much knowledge about her early life, because she left England alone at the age of 18 and never had any contact with any of her family again. But I learned a bit more about her on this trip, including the fact that I don't have to feel guilty anymore about my real name's being of eventual Welsh origin because she was half Welsh, which makes me 1/16th Welsh and completely entitled.

Her mother was Welsh and died when she was a toddler and her father was an English glassblower whose lungs were injured when she was a child which meant that he couldn't blow glass anymore. After her mother died, she had to go live in Wales with her mother's relatives because he couldn't (or wouldn't?) take care of her, and she forgot how to speak English while she was there, speaking only Welsh. When her father remarried and she came to live with him and his wife (I think she was five), she discovered to her horror that the wife was a textbook evil stepmother who disapproved of Welsh and beat her every time she spoke it until she'd learned English again. She had completely forgotten Welsh by the time she grew up.

1. Like how, when she was a flapper and working as a nurse in Toronto, she jumped into the river in January on a dare and got pneumonia.