Back in 1910, family was of utmost importance. Your immediate family took care of you in times of need, for there was no social safety net. Children, especially male children, were expected to help out their parents financially, if needed. Girls helped with the day-to-day housekeeping. Your extended family provided you with possibilities for widening your horizons, traveling for work or leisure, or meeting an eligible mate outside your immediate circle.  The Nicholsons were extremely close-knit, except for son Herb. Read all the Nicholson letters to learn all about family life in 1910. Read below if you want a taste.

Norm goes away to work on the railway in La Tuque Quebec; Edith gets a job in tiny Radnor Forges, teaching 10 kids; Marion gets a job teaching in the Montreal in impoverished St. Henri teaching 50 kids;  Edith returns to the city and gets a job at a private school, French Methodist, in elegant Westmount; Marion and Edith shop for hats at Ogilvy. Herb is caught stealing at the bank where he works; Edith loses her fiance in a fire; Norman goes awol from work and is fired; Norman pays Herb's way out West, staking him to -yikes- 500 dollars, half a year's salary, were he working; Norman asks local MP Tobin to get his job with the railway back; Tobin obliges. Norman goes to Ontario. Herb drifts from job to job out West, eventually working for Massey Harris in collection.  Flora is accepted at Macdonald College, 'new teachers with new methods'; the family 'sews her up' for school; Flora boards in beautiful Ste Anne de Bellevue, attends classes, masquerades and gets 'fat' on soda and cake.
Marion gets a raise and reaches for the top. Edith has a falling out with the Methodist principal at her school perhaps over Church Union debate. Margaret worries about getting enough wood to warm the house and to cook with; she attends political rallies and is  all for free trade.  Laurier loses the free trade election, the family is devastated. (Will Norman lose his job again?) Margaret worries about the bugs eating her potatoes; she tends a relative with typhoid, another with consumption; she feuds with her rich brother-in-law.  Her brother dies, her mom dies (so many people dying). After the funerals, she takes a few trips around the Eastern Townships, sometimes by automobile, and joins the Order of the Eastern Star. "Nothing frivolous about it," she writes.  Marion is introduced to a nice man, Mr. Blair. Edith and Marion visit a rich doctor relative, Henry Watters, in Boston in the summer. He must be doing well for he  has a Stanley Steamer ! Henry is everything Herb isn't, successful and devoted to kin.

Mr. Blair blows off  his old  girlfriend "We were never engaged and as for me there was no understanding either" and  takes Marion to see Harry Lauder, the Scottish comedian.. Norman is transferred from Cochrane to Hearst and is impressed by the Indian Squaws he sees near his camp, how they can paddle a canoe and wield an axe with a baby on their back. The Titanic sinks. Herb's debts build, he ignores all responsibility for them. The family almost loses the house. Marion saves the day with the extra money from her raise. (She doesn't need it, she writes, ironically, because she isn't going to get married 'and that's what girls save for, isn't it,  a trousseau?')

Marion is promised the 7^th grade to teach and is sickened when a mere boy out of school is promoted over her and given a much higher salary. Laurier visits the Roundhouse at Cochrane to give a speech, Norm remarks upon it in his diary. Flora gets a class in school in the city (Griffintown) "not a good area of town" says Margaret, and is paid a much lower salary than the male graduate of Macdonald.   Edith quits her Academy and goes to live in Richmond with her mom. She attends a local wedding and describes the fashions there.  Marion looks - and looks and looks - for an apartment of her own to share with friends, for she hates the way the landlady in her rooming house lords it over her. She lands one on Hutchison with the daughter of an MNA (promising the landlady that her mother is coming to live with her) but she won't let her obliging beau,  Mr. Blair, or "Romeo" help her stoke the furnace. Marion loses the apartment (or choooses to give it up as it is impossible for the four tenants (all teachers) to work AND keep the home running well; she gets engaged to Mr. Blair, despite the fact his parents won't have any part  of it.   She writes her dad asking if he can pay for a wedding or dowry. Her dad doesn't know what to say, he is dead broke. For the first and only time, he questions son Herb's integrity in a letter. "I hope he hasn't got any bad habits." BURN THIS LETTER he writes at the end. Marion and Hugh Blair marry in October, 1913. Hugh's well off parents do not attend the wedding. Norman spends 30.00 on wedding clothes. 6.65 on a cake
Not in letters: Marion gives up teaching, only to return many years later after Hugh's untimely death. (Frail at the end, Hugh was tricked by his brothers into signing away his share of the family business.) The Masons help Marion out financially. She wheels and deals to secure university educations for all of her 4 children. She never remarries, preferring her independence, but has a boyfriend.  She becomes a powerful force in the PAPT, Quebec Protestant Teachers' Union, fighting for higher salaries for teachers and for pensions too, but dies of a heart attack before receiving a pension herself .

Edith teachers at St. Francis College in 1914; takes a secretarial course in 1917 in Boston, works for Sun Life, In 1922 becomes matron at McGill's Female Phys Ed House; eventually becomes Deputy Matron at Victoria College then Assistant Registrar at Mcgill. She is in and out of hospital and has many medical bills to pay. Her 'family' Marion's children, fail to visit, enough. She is hurt. She travels twice to Europe, to Scotland and France in the thirties, rsearching her roots at Isle of Lewis and loving the food in Paris. She is Commandant of the Red Cross in Quebec during WW11. She retires to Tighsolas in 1967 or thereabouts. She lives in "genteel poverty" with her sister, Flora and Flora's husband, Wes. Dies in 1977, telling her nephew on her deathbed to 'take advantage of life.'

Flo works as a teacher in Griffintown and then in LaTuque, in a high school. She marries Wesley Creighton and has one son, Norman. She continues to teach. Later, she lives with sister Edith on Grey Avenue in Westmount. She retires to Tighsolas in the 60's with husband and Edith and dies in 1978, a few months after Edith.