Sometimes all you have to do is ask the question and the answer will come. A few weeks back, shortly after I posted the previous entry (in which I speculated that perhaps my great grandmother and her sisters taught school in the mining camp town of Minera, Texas), a researcher friend of mine saw the link on Facebook and did a few quick searches in the newspaper databases he can access. (It happens he is a very good researcher.)
Sure enough, he found a number of clippings in the Laredo papers that show that Anna and Mary (along with other girls), taught school in Minera, and they stayed there during the school term with occasional visits home.
March 1908: Anna is around twenty years old.
September 1908:
November 1908: Little ten-year-old sister Kathryn comes up to visit! (Bonus: Mrs. Roy was the wife of the mine superintendent.)
Mary had the teaching gig by September 1910, when she was around twenty. Obviously she survived the ordeal described below. (Homesickness maybe?)
February 1911: Guess they had a long holiday break. Interesting that Anna was living in Corpus Christi at this point. She might have been staying with the cousins and great-aunts/uncles who might have still been living up there. Was she teaching school there, too?
May 1911: Mary comes home for the summer.
Not yet known: how many terms they taught. And did they need the money and/or experience? Or were they in it for the adventure?
We know that Helen, who came next in age after Mary, taught in the mining town of Dolores. That might have been around the time Minera shut down in 1915. Did the two youngest MacGregor sisters—Margaret and Kathryn—teach as well when they were old enough? And if so, did they teach in places like Minera and Dolores?
(Ed. note: didn’t mean to stay away for a whole month! I try to post weekly when I can, but sometimes it’ll be more like once a month. Sign up for email notifications if you want to know when I’ve updated.)
