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Note: n apprenticeship with his father in the latter’s print shop completed his education. When his parents divorced in the early 1900s, Ralph, unlike his siblings, stayed with his father to Manchester, likely to complete his training. It was there that he met and married Olive. Ralph found a job as a clerk and accountant at the American Locomotive Company, and the family lived at 77 Blodget Street, near, and later with, his father.
Moving in with Olive’s parents in 1909, the family removed to Fitchburg, Massachusetts in 1911, where they remained for a year before moving back to Massachusetts, living with Ralph’s mother at 15 Sewall Street in Melrose, where Edna was born and Olive died, at age 31, of heart problems. Leaving Melrose after the tragedy, Ralph settled in Everett, where he resided at 126A Bucknam Street, and re-married, to a woman named Gertrude KEELER about 1914. Working as an accountant and manager for the United Drug Company, Ralph remained in Everett through 1920, when he and his mother (who had been living with him since 1916) removed to Dorchester. It was apparently about this time that Gertrude and their two young sons, Ralph Jr. and Harold, died in the Spainish Flu pandemic, leaving Ralph again a widower.
Family lore has it that Ralph died of intestinal problems in 1919, which is a few years too early, as he was certainly still alive in 1920. There is also the story of Ralph’s young third wife, apparently the wicked step-mother. Ralph supposedly remarried a third time, to 19-year-old Emma SPINNEY, who he met while on business in Florida. Shortly after he died, Emma attempted to put both Arlene and Edna into an orphanage, and would have succeeded had not Ralph’s sister Ethel, and her husband, George WHITMORE, stepped in to rescue them, obtaining custody (but not adopting) the girls.
How much of this is true will have to be determined from Middlesex and/or Suffolk County court records, to the extent they still exist. Ralph did remarry. In the 1920 Census, he is living with his wife Emeline. She is almost certainly the Emeline Doris SPINNEY, born 24 April 1900 in Gloucester, daughter of Thurston D. and Ada P. (Dakin) SPINNEY, both Nova Scotian immigrants. How much she deserves to be vilified is unclear; no doubt, being a 20-year-old widow with step-daughters only a few years younger than her and no viable means of support would have been a stressful enough situation to cause even the best of us problems. She may have succumbed to an early death herself, as I cannot locate her in the 1930 Census under any surname. Physically, Ralph was slender, of medium height, with brown eyes and black hair.
Note: Born and raised in Chelsea, Ralph received a public education through the 8th grade before a
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