Welcome to Clare's Scrapbook

Clarice Edna Crooks was born in Nova Scotia, Canada in 1902. She grew up in the small fishing village of Seal Harbour in Guysborough County. When she finished school she moved to Halifax to work and from there to Boston, Massachusetts to nursing school. There she met and married George Norman Downing.

Like many teenage girls of her day Clare kept a scrapbook of newspaper items that caught her interest. Most clippings were poems, stories, or moralizing advice. The book itself was an old cloth-bound farming/home economics textbook. She glued a colored waterside picture on the front to hide the original title (which seems to have been "The Family Health Guide").

Clare began keeping the scrapbook in her teens. The clippings lack information identifying the date or the name of the newspaper, so it's difficult to establish a timeline. But some of the items provide enough context to show she kept adding to the book into her twenties at nursing school. She never filled the book completely, and seems to have stopped adding to it when she and George married. Clare kept the book throughout her life. Her husband George also treasured it; on the inside front cover he mounted a laminated clipping of her obituary.

Clare's scrapbook has deteriorated to the point that it is difficult to handle without damaging it. There is no way to save the yellowed clippings from eventually disintegrating, but we can preserve a record of what it contained. This blog offers a transcription of the scrapbook's contents. Each item she pasted in is posted here, more or less in the order Clare added them. The explanatory footnotes are my own. There is also a search function for terms included anywhere in the blog.

Most of us who are Clare's descendants have no memory of her at all, and for those who do the memories are dimmed by time. My hope in creating this blog is that we can better understand this wonderful woman and perhaps find insights for our own lives in the things she held dear.

-TD