Gertrude Moody: Epilogue

The internet works its magic

After I published my last post about Gertrude Moody, something happened that made it feel like 101 years got condensed into no time at all.

A Foreign Country is about the past, so usually the interesting people I run across while working on it are gone. Gertrude is a good example of that and so is my great aunt Hazel. I love the idea that they were both probably in the same room the night of January 9, 1921 and wish I could talk to each of them and ask them all the questions I have.

After I wrote about Gertrude, I got a message from a woman who’d found the post and told me that she was Gertrude’s great granddaughter. What a moment—those two amazing women connecting us just over 100 years after they (unknowingly) were in the same place together.

We exchanged messages because of course I wanted to know everything including whether any of the Gertrudes I’d identified in my research were correct. My conclusion in the original piece was that I hadn’t found the Gertrude, in which case I really wanted to know who the Gertrude from my great aunt’s story was and see what else I could find to fill in the gaps.

It turns out that this Gertrude, the vaudeville actress who had performed widely throughout the United States in the 1920s, was born in 1891 and immigrated to Alberta, Canada, in 1905. She married and had two daughters before crossing the border at Portal, North Dakota, in 1917. At that time, her paperwork listed her occupation as musician and her destination as Chicago. Within a few years she was in New York and by 1921 was a professional performer with her own act, Opera and Jazz, Inc, that toured regularly around the country. 

Her children and mother would eventually join her in Queens. After decades on the East Coast, she moved to Florida where she spent the rest of her life. She passed away in 1976. What a lady and I would give anything to be able to go back and attend any of these performances throughout her career.

Her great granddaughter was kind enough to share a few things of hers with me, including her cigarette case and some sheet music.

After finding the original reference to her performing for an audience that included my great aunt, and then taking the deep dive to find out more about her, this exchange with her great granddaughter was such a thrill—the next best thing to the past coming to life.

You can see newspaper clippings advertising Gertrude’s performances in the first post 1921: Gertrude Moody.