Edmund and Alice Ash





These are my maternal grandparents.  I've been trying to date this picture for sometime and decided to go with that it's likely an anniversary.    I think it might be their 20th on January 26th 1929.   Grampa would have be 53 in this picture and grandma would be 38.  They had 8 living children.  She died May 17th 1938 of a cancerous tumour on her neck at the 48 years, 10 months and 13 days. I'm not really good at dating pictures and it is just a guess.
    One of Ed's ancestors, Jesse Sage, died with a neck tumour, Alice had a neck tumour, one of Ed and Alice's son died from Hodgkin's Lymphoma and a member of mom's family has Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma with involvement in most of the usual lymphatic areas including the neck.

This is the little family in 1915.  Uncle Leo the oldest, under his dad's hand and the youngest Walter were two of the three boys who fought at the front in WWII.  The next and last son to be born was Ken in 1917 and he is still over there buried at Nijmegen, Netherlands.  Then the last were two girls, my mother and her sister who was born 7 years later and today is the only remaining member of the family.  Walter was the one who had Hodkin's and the little pudgy face in the front was Cecil who lost a leg to a train and then eventually was killed by one.  So my dear grandparents certainly had a lot of grief in their family and my great aunt even writes their hard life in various letters when they moved to Saskatchewan for a time from Alberta shortly after 1915. 

Times were tough in those days, really tough, not conditions that we will ever see I hope.