M. Mason with friend, Mary Ann Tasker

I called my great-grandmother "Grandma Tasker" and I have strong memories of her even though she died when I was 6 years old. To give you a sense of her: When I watched a tv show about "the manners of Downton Abbey", everything they talked about - the "proper" way of doing things = reminded me of Grandma Tasker. She was a "proper lady" even though she wasn't of the upper class. Grandma Tasker was born in Mountain Ash Wales. Her mother had been married previously and had children from that marriage. When her husband died, she married a younger man - Grandma's father, Davy Jones. (Yes, that's such a common name in Wales! Not only that, but the descendants of his second marriage insist that he was called David. I bet because he was older when he married the 2nd time). When my sister and I visited Mountain Ash (the year before Covid), we visited the house she was born in. A row house that was most probably for coal miners - Grandma's mother's first husband was a coal miner, as was Davy. When Grandma's mother died, her father, Davy, married again and started a new family. As I understand it, Grandma Tasker didn't get along with her step-mother. So she first became a "domestic" but that didn't suit her. So she "went to London to live with the Sisters". I put that in quotes because that's what her daughter (my grandmother) told me. I always thought that meant that she lived in a convent with nuns. Nope. Remember, this is jolly old England (and Wales). It meant she moved to London to work with nurses. And somewhere along the line, she ran into my great-grandfather, William Tasker. (We think that they may have met through a cousin.) Scandal alert: They married around early 1906 when Grandma Tasker was several months pregnant with their first child, Uncle Bill. (I never met him because he died before I was born, as did Grandpa Tasker. The reason for their late marriage may have been that Grandpa Tasker was at sea until then.) They had 3 children in total (my grandmother was the middle child, born in 1908). When grandma was around 5, the family emigrated to the US. They first lived in South Dakota and then moved to Seattle WA (West Seattle), where they lived for decades and where both William (father) and Bill or Willie (son) both died in the early 1930s. The 2 girls, Connie and Ethel, lived long and full lives. When Connie lived in Bremerton, WA, Grandma Tasker lived with them and took the ferry to Seattle where she worked as a store clerk. Later in life, she lived in Piedmont, CA and we visited her there. When she became ill, she moved to Idaho where she lived with her youngest daughter, Ethel, and she died there.