Before I inherited
the beautiful leather photo album from my great grandmother, the only thing
that I knew about her is that she was 5'11" and always stood very erect. When the average height of European men
during World War II was 5'7", Eliza towered over most men and certainly over
other women of her era.
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| Eliza Hannah Fuller nee Gray c1930s |
I never met Eliza but because the 117 photos in her album were unnamed I wanted to learn about her life so that I might try to put names to faces.
Traditional document research revealed that Eliza
Hannah Gray was the third of eight children and oldest daughter of Henry Thomas
Gray and his wife Sarah Bright. Eliza
was born in Somerset, England but the family soon moved to Monmouthshire, Wales
for mining job opportunities. As an
adult Eliza moved to Kent, England where she married and had five children. She and her family later emigrated to Canada.
Eliza grew up in the middle years of Queen Victoria’s reign. By Eliza's 1956 death she saw five more British monarchs come to the throne and 16 Canadian Prime Ministers move in and out of power in her adopted home of Canada.
Eliza lived in three countries, lived through
two World Wars and the Great Depression.
She welcomed many new inventions that her descendants enjoy in everyday
life. Central heating, indoor running water, indoor bathrooms,
electric lights, the gramophone to bring music into the home, telephones and
television are just a few of the inventions that Eliza would have seen. It was during her lifetime that women won the
right to vote. In the background, after the wars, government
and business was developing mammoth-sized binary computers.
The one invention that did not come soon enough for Eliza was penicillin. Her grandson Hector died of an ear infection at 16 years old, just 4 years before the public use of the drug that might have saved his life.
