My sister told me that she found Anna Marguerite Pearson in the 1940 census living at St. Mary’s Hall, a Catholic boarding school for girls in Burlington, NJ. I typed those magic words into a google search engine and to my delight found a 1940 school year book with a good photo of Marguerite. We had never seen a picture of her. Her parents Ellen Doran and Amos Moffat Pearson had both died by 1932. Jim Doran told us that he had not known what happened to his Pearson cousins after their parents died. Marguerite was only ten at the time, just three years younger than Jim. Jim always spoke very fondly of the Pearson family and had hoped that we would find out some day what happened to them. Today we unravelled a small piece of that mystery.

Marguerite was sent to live at a wonderful boarding school, where she appears to have flourished. My guess is that her older sister Bess Pearson, who was already a career girl in New York, made the arrangements for her.

I just love this photo of Marguerite. Isn’t she lovely!

Marguerite appears, at least on the surface, to have been very happy at school. She was in the glee club, the science club, on the hockey and basketball teams, and she was active on the year book committee. Her classmates voted her “the most happy-go-lucky”, “the most personality”, and “most talkative”. Written under her name for “the song that applies” category in the yearbook was the title “Don’t Worry About Me”. How much I wonder, was that just whistling in the dark? We’ll never really know. But at least now we do know that she was safe and heathy and had learned to make the best out of her life at a very young age.