Florida St Martin Crepeau Walter, my Aunt

My Aunt Flo and Me, in 1959, from a still off a Super 8.

Aunt Flo, 1940′s.

I found my Aunt Flo. On the 1911 Census. After a second try.

The last time I looked, I somehow thought her natal name to be St-Clair and found nothing. Last night, I decided to try again and wrote in St-Martin, without thinking, and found her. Of course, St-Martin was her natal family name, she had told me, but I had forgotten, and then my subconsious memory kicked in and I found her!

Here she is:

According to family legend, she always showed up in rags to beg at the home of Jules Crepeau, my grandfather, and she was given food and new clothes and sent home. But then she returned again in rags. So they finally just ‘adopted’ her. The 1911 census says her dad worked for the City, so that makes sense. As a city worker he would know the name of Jules and somehow he got his address, to send his daughter begging.

(The Census says the father Onesime, the dad, was making 600 a year, and he already had five children under the age of 7. (It is said that 1,500 a year was a minimum needed in the era to support a family in dignity, but I found few families making that.

My grandfather, in 1911, was making 3,500 a year, and would end up making 10,000 a year in the 1920′s. (A newspaper reporter in 1913 accused Jules of making a lot more than that from graft.) Thomas Wells, the President of Laurentian Spring Water claims to be making 7,000 a year in 1911…In 1911, Marion Nicholson was making 600 as a teacher, but she had no children and lived for three months at her parents’ house in Richmond. Her father was making 1,000 a month on the railroad. Apparently, a good cook cost about 600 a year. Cooks were among the better paid domestics)

The family myth goes, Flo’s natural mother was an alcoholic actress and one of the most beautiful women my grandfather had ever seen.

Well, Aunt Flo, if not beautiful, was extremely photogenic and she seemed to have an instinctive knowlege of how to carry herself, to be sexy, which is not something the women in her adopted family had.

(Flo herself looked like the actress Barbara Stanwick.)

This had to be picked up from her natal mother.

Anyway, here she is, Florida (or Florence) St Martin, Crepeau, Walter. She married a Frank Walter later in life, a French (from France) graphic designer. He was much older, a ladies man from what I could see, but he almost called off the wedding when he heard Aunt Flo was adopted and not the natural daughter of Jules Crepeau, former Director of Services of the City of Montreal.

Flo died in 1998 at the Veteran’s Hospital in Ste. Anne de Bellevue. She had been a WAC, working in recruiting, using her sex appeal to lure young men into the armed forces, no doubt. She had no children, but a fun life. She worked as a salesgirl at Morgan’s Department Store and so got a lot of nice dresses to wear at cheap prices. She worked at the University of Montreal, in the cafeteria late in life, say in her 70′s, allowing her to mix with people, as she was very social.

She liked to go on long drives with her husband, making picnics.. and she often vacationed in Old Orchard, where the Crepeaus had vacations. I went with Flo and Frank, her husband, one summer.

She had a third grade education, it is said, but she could read and write and speak both English and French and if her math skills were poor, she always managed to live within her means, while enjoying life, a skill many PhD’s in Mathematics do not have.