Lizzie Bentley at about 17, Halifax, Nova Scotia
There are a lot of reasons why Ruth Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bentley is at the top of my ancestors-I-wish-I-could-meet list. Here are a few of them.
1) Although born hearing, Lizzie became deaf after an undisclosed illness when she was three. The only deaf person in her family, she somehow figured things out until, at eleven, she was sent off to the Deaf and Dumb Institution in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Miles from home, she not only figured things out some more, she found a husband (Robert G. Tupper, who was born deaf).
2) Lizzie collected photographs. In 1872, her older sister Jane presented her with an album to keep them in.
3) Lizzie and Robert raised two wonderful children. I got to meet one: my great-grandmother Bertha Evelyn Tupper, who lived to be 98 years old. Here she is at threee, but when I knew Bertha she was almost one hundred years old--and smart as a whip and deaf as a post (according to my mother).
Bertha apparently took a ballpoint pen to her mother's album.
4) Lizzie was nice. Her father-in-law wrote of her on 14 May 1889, "Lizie is very kind I think more of her ever day". Lizzie and Robert were living with and caring for Robert's parents (Samuel Tupper and Martha Howard) and by 1891 Samuel would have some painful digestive issues and Martha had some sort of dementia. It cannot have been easy, but she did it with grace.
The household. Samuel in a beard; Robert at right
5) She lived to be 99 years old. My father, who was her great-grandson and was four when she died, remembered her teaching him an old style of sign language, spelling words into his hand.
Lizzie in her late 90s with my dad's cousin
∞) But the main, undeniable reason I want to meet Lizzie is her album. I have become the guardian of that album and, because of her, I not only can see the faces of many these lovely people, but also own a stack of photography and fashion reference books that I can get lost in. Many of the pictures are on this site, as I try to analyze them as best I can.
So for all of Lizzie's grit and kindness (a great combination, honestly), I would be willing to travel in time if she would just tell me who the hell all these people are.