Rose’s March History

Time has been marching along in silence for the past few months on my family history blog.  I can’t say why exactly I’ve taken this break. But I’m ready now to rev up and re-open Indiana Ties…to get the words flowing again.

Just for fun, I’m gathering a few March themes together for my family history re-opening story.  Let’s see if I can tie together my mother’s birthday, Women’s History Month and March Madness.  Here we go….

This family history story centers around my mother, Rosemary Ethel Weber, and the ladies in her life as a young woman. She enjoyed  family vacations, participating in sports and traveling with her friends.  Actually, this March story began on the 3rd of the month in 1916 when Rosemary was born in Indianapolis, Indiana to Harry Lawrence and Otillia Catherine (Kuhn) Weber.  (I wrote about the family previously in my “Ladies In My Line” post.) 

In the early 1930s Rose attended Sacred Heart High School and after graduation in 1934 was employed as a stenographer at an insurance company.  She had an active social life with her friends during these teens and twenties.  Groups of pals went on bike outings, performed in the school musicals, traveled the U.S. and played sports.  The friends who formed her Lakla Mata Club in their years at Sacred Heart maintained their “club” gatherings and togetherness throughout their lives. 

In the 1930s Rose played guard for the Young Ladies Sodality basketball team of Sacred Heart parish. This news clipping from March, 1935, tells their own March Madness story.  She’s on the right in the second row. The relationships formed in these days lasted, as I came to know  some of these friends as I grew up.

Another favorite activity for Rose and her friends was bicycling.  Mom’s photo albums from those youthful years contain examples of these biking trips. Rose and her pals were fortunate to be able to share car trips also.  As the young ladies became employed after high school, they could pool their funds to make trips  to such places as Washington, D.C. , Virginia Beach, the Chicago World’s Fair (Rose at Chicago World’s Fair, photo below), on sightseeing trips where they stayed in hostels and cabins and to take boat trips on Lake Michigan.  My mother, her sisters and their contemporaries, found their own paths of independence as they ventured out on their own. Were these ladies a part of establishing a new era for women? Maybe the 1920 women’s vote and the Roaring 20s broke the ice and opened new possibilities for the ladies of the 30s.  I wish that I had asked her more about how she felt as she became a woman. 

Women’s History Month is about Rosa Parks and Sandra Day O’Connor and other leaders, most assuredly.  Then, there are the women’s histories within our own families that have a direct impact on each of us.  Rose, Gin, Peg, Dolly, Betty and Ruth are a part of Women’s History Month as well as March Madness.  This team of girls had their own brand of excitement, their own ways of branching out and making history.  I’m glad to bring together my own brand of March family history here on Indiana Ties.