Margaret Thompson McMaster

Margaret Thompson McMaster was born in 1835 and died in 1910, age 75. She married Gilbert Clement McMaster and was the mother of twin sons born in 1866: Erasmus Darwin McMaster and Robert Thompson McMaster.

The single surviving photograph of her in the family archive is a B. L. H. Dabbs cabinet card (Nos. 46, 48 and 50 St. Clair Street, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania), dated 1866, in which she holds the infant twins. The sepia print is small — 2¼” by 3⅜” — and the original has faded with smudges, but Maggie Eesley’s catalogue preserves the studio’s full address and the exact relationship between the figures she is holding.

The catalogue’s tragic note, transmitted from Maggie’s mother Peggy McMaster Eesley, who in turn had heard it from her own father:

One twin is named Erasmus Darwin and the other is Robert T. McMaster. Erasmus died of a weakened heart early on and Robert lived with his weakened heart until the age of 55.

That Robert — Chuck’s great-grandfather — carried the same condition his twin had died of and managed to outrun it for half a century is the small fact the photograph preserves underneath the formal cabinet-card composition.

She is Maggie Eesley’s great-grandmother, and Chuck’s great-great-grandmother.

Source: Maggie Eesley, Four Generations of the Eesley Family (PowerPoint archive); deck ID MTM001 en; cabinet card by B. L. H. Dabbs, Pittsburg, PA, 1866.