The famous Blain girls

That's my great-aunt Hazel in the photo. Yesterday I was talking with my mother about her mother and her mother's sisters who grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in the early 1900s. My great-grandmother, Marielice Langlois Blain, must have had her hands full with those girls: Eva, Irene, Rose (my grandmother), Lena, Hazel, Flo, Estelle, and Jeanette. My mother said they were lively dark-haired beauties who loved to go to local dances. Aunt Lena was missing a front tooth and when she went to dances she would stick a dried lima bean in the gap in her mouth to fill the empty space. Sounds quite glamorous, doesn’t it?

Aunt Hazel lived into her nineties. A number of years ago, not long before she died, she was talking with me on the phone from her nursing home in Florida. I told her that I worked with a man who was born and raised in Holyoke. Aunt Hazel said, “You’ve got to ask him about the Blain girls. If he’s from Holyoke, he’ll remember us. The Blain girls were famous in Holyoke.”

I hate to think about what kind of fame the Blain girls had that their reputation survived for nearly 100 years. Quite a legacy we have to uphold, we who descended from the famous Blain girls.

(Thanks to cousin Anita for the photo of Aunt Hazel and all the other old family photos!)