Getting to Know Aunt Barbara

I just looked through Aunt Barbara’s two passports. She went to Guadalupe and Jamaica in 1981, and she went to France and Montreal, Canada in the 1980s. She was in Montreal in 1982 (March 25); on the same page, strangely, is a very faded stamp that appears to say “Maryland” and has the date of February 4, 1986. Surely she didn’t live in Montreal, Canada for four years—I just talked with my dad about it, and it looks like she visited that particular part of Canada more than once. She was in France in 1986, when she was thirty-nine. She also had an International Driving Permit, to drive in France.

It looks like she arrived in France on 13 Aout (August?), 1986; she has France stamps for Sept 20, 1986 and Sept 30, 1986. She returned to Logan Airport in Boston on Sept 30, 1986. On a separate page is a French stamp for Sept 2, 1986; I’m guessing she had to get her passport stamped in different parts of France, while she drove around. She returned to France in November (18^th, apparently), 1986. Then again, maybe she was still there. The same passport page has “Sept 16” and Sept 20” stamps. One of the French stamps is for “17 Feurier 1987” which probably translates as February and is perhaps when she left France for Boston. Another stamp is dated “26 November 1986” and like all the other French stamps has the name Charles de Gaulle on it, perhaps the name of the airport. In the back of the passport are some stamps that are hard to read. One is an orange stamp, and the place name looks like “Wepenetse.”

On the next page are two purple stamps that appear to say “Warsaw,” with the date of 30.01.93 (January 30, 1993), so I’m guessing she visited the site of the Warsaw ghetto in Poland; this would be appropriate, since some of our ancestors were from there. The date for these stamps is 22.01.93. Under one of them is a faded red stamp for 23APR1986.

The older passport was issued August 21, 1981 and expired Aug 20, 1986. The other passport was issued on Feb 21, 1986, and it expired on Feb 20, 1996.

We also have three copies of her birth certificate, one issued in 1962 and the other two issued in 1971. She was born in the county of Allegheny, in Pittsburgh, PA, on 8/27/1947. Her full name was Barbara Lynn Wiget. My grandparents’ names were Francis Xavier Wiget and Edith Lucille Band (maiden name). Until I read this, I had only known my grandmother’s name as Lucy.

Aunt Barbara had many neatly organized files. They include files of stock dividend information. My dad said she was a combination of charitable and greedy, and I pointed out that in order to make donations, you have to have money. However, she did have an American Express card and an Amazon.com card (and many receipts or some sort of paperwork from Amazon), and she had a Costco membership. She drove a fancy sports car (part of a history of driving fancy sports cars). She lived in a fine old condo full of antiques (but according to my dad, her TV was from the seventies). It seems she had a relatively posh lifestyle, but having stock and getting money from her mother made it possible for her to not only have that lifestyle but also support charitable organizations. Her choice of what to do with her estate is definitely humanitarian and so much bigger than leaving money to relatives. A combination, indeed.

My dad hit the nail on the head when he said, “Her world centered around tennis.” She seems to have had many tennis buddies, and her apartment is decorated with tennis stuff—in particular a collection of tennis rackets hanging on the walls in her study.