Our Sepia Saturday theme image this week featured a woman on her wedding day in 1928 in Canada. Well, fortunately, I have photos of a wedding in 1927 in Canada that line up pretty well! Above, we have Bessie Melita Creber on the left and her mother, Mary Jane (Battin) Creber on the right. Melita (or “Meta” for short, as it appears on the back of other photos) was born 1 August 1899 in Plymouth, Devon, England, daughter of Mary Jane Battin and John Samuel Creber. Her family, along with two siblings, left England for a new home in Canada in 1911. Meta is just a year younger than my great grandmother, and both their mothers were sisters who must’ve kept in touch over the years. On 18 Jun 1927, Meta married Alfred Norman Harris in Montreal, Canada at the Trinity Memorial Church. I’m not quite sure where these photos were taken, but it’s probably Alfred’s mother’s home in Montreal. The couple appears to later have lived in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada where both Meta and her husband passed away in 1985 and 1969 respectively.
This also lines up with a previous Sepia Saturday posting (#233) where I posted a larger group shot of the wedding party. It’s pretty great to find a match to the theme image so close in time and place, so I knew this had to be the one for this week!
Nicely done. Those big bouquets of the times were certainly something, and it’s interesting how the mother’s flowers are pinned to the lowered waistline of her dress rather than worn in the usual manner of a corsage.
I wonder if maybe they’re tucked into her pocket? I can’t imagine the strain on her dress of pinning that large of an arrangement there all day!
An excellent match. Women’s hat fashion changed dramatically in the postwar years, going for that helmet look. But until this week I hadn’t appreciated how brides’ cap and veil fashion also changed toward a modern style.