Margaret Florence Anderson

She was the fourth of six Anderson children and the older sister of Alice by two years and three months. Born 23 March 1869 in Washington County, Pennsylvania, she grew up in the household of Rev. Abraham Ramsey Anderson the Presbyterian minister and Nancy Jane Shaw — a 19th-century western Pennsylvania manse with five other children and the daily rhythms of a parish family. Per Dale Eesley’s FamilySearch tree (ID GMSS-RZW), her marriage and death dates are open in the structured record. The siblings as the GEDCOM has them are: Anna Janett (1862), John Wallace (1864), Mary Belle (1866), Margaret Florence (1869), Alice Gertrude (1871), William James (1875).

The May 1894 letter

The single substantive trace of her in this archive is the letter her father wrote her on Monday, 21 May 1894 — the Rev. Anderson 1894 letter. She was twenty-five. He was sixty-two. She was away from home; he was writing through a rainy day’s news from the parish — Joseph C. Scott’s carbuncle, Charles Wallace’s new daughter, Emma Moore taking sick at Sunday service, the womanish question of whether Marie should attend the W.M. Society meeting at Thomas Station on Thursday “just to show her new dress,” and his own coat-and-vest order at John Wanamaker’s. The letter strongly suggests she was preparing for her own college commencement — her father is buying clothes for it.

What that commencement was is the queued research question. Western Pennsylvania colleges open to women in the early 1890s were limited: Washington Female Seminary in Washington County (the family’s own county); Pittsburgh Female College and several normal schools (teacher colleges) in the broader region. The Anderson family was a Presbyterian-minister family of modest means, the kind of household that would have prioritized teacher training for a daughter. The most likely commencement is a normal-school graduation that would have put her into the western-Pennsylvania classroom her younger sister Alice would also enter a few years later. That parallel is suggestive: both Anderson sisters became schoolteachers in the same era.

The line in the letter — “I’ll write you a few lines” — registers across the seventy-five-year distance to her grand-nephew Charlie’s Vietnam letters that open the same way: a father (or boyfriend) using a rainy quiet to write to family he could not see in person.

What the GEDCOM does and doesn’t settle

The structured record gives her birth date and birthplace definitively (FS ID GMSS-RZW; b. 23 March 1869, Washington County, PA). It gives her no death date, no marriage, no children — meaning either she died unmarried, or her later life simply hasn’t been documented in Dale’s tree. Both are common patterns for daughters of the era. Among her siblings, only Alice’s life is fully traced in this archive (through Alice’s daughter Peggy and her granddaughter Maggie); the other four Anderson siblings are similarly under-documented and would be a productive next research thread.

The first Margaret

The name Margaret as a family-line tradition in Chuck’s paternal branch starts here. The Margaret Florence of 1894 → her sister Alice → Alice’s daughter Margaret Jane “Peggy” McMaster Eesley (1914–2007), Chuck’s grandmother → Peggy’s daughter Margaret “Maggie” Eesley (Chuck’s aunt, the Four Generations archivist whose deck catalogued the very letter that opens this entry). The naming pattern across three generations of Margarets is the family’s quiet tribute to this great-great-aunt.

She is Chuck’s great-great-aunt on the paternal side — sister of his great-grandmother Alice.

Sources: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Margaret Florence Anderson (GMSS-RZW); the 21 May 1894 letter from her father; Maggie Eesley’s Four Generations archive, which preserved the letter as the deck’s MALetterSide A 001 en / B 001 en.