Queen of Carnival

Helen Guenther, queen of the Court of Carnival Flowers, San Antonio TX 1911.

I came across this gorgeous photo the other day on FB (Traces of Texas perhaps, but I can't find it any more).

I saved it because I had a relative who worked on some of the dresses for the court.  My grandmother was a seamstress, though relatively young when Helen was the queen.  Mozelle Booth Miller had just reached her 13th birthday in Sept. 1911.  She was the oldest of the 4 girls born to a German immigrant father who worked for the railroad and a Texas born woman from a family of lawyers and Spiritualists.

I give her background, since almost everyone in San Antonio came from someplace in their family trees, those who'd originally come from the Canary Islands, those of German heritage, or the many Hispanic families from Mexico who settled Texas before it became a Republic and then a US state.

But back to my grandmother. At 13 she probably went to see the parade...imagine a rose parade as Texans would do it...lavish, colorful, a grand celebration with music and romance in the air. Grandmommy was precocious, I'd imagine, and wanting very much to dress up like those gorgeous ladies on the floats. She would know all about the "season" of balls and receptions that the elite families were having in the city. She wasn't going to any of them, but talking about them while attending school.

Why do I think she was precocious? She married when she was 17! Of course that might have been a normal enough age in 1915, and she turned 18 a month later.  My mother wasn't born until March of 1917. And her father was in real estate.

But he died very young, and Grandmommy continued living on her own, with her 2 year old baby at least for a year. (Census of 1920, after Bud Webb died in 1919.)

And this is where her career as a seamstress started, I imagine. She was good enough at her trade to sew the ball gowns, and perhaps some of the gowns worn by the court members of the Carnival of Flowers. Her sisters also listed seamstress sometimes on their census records.

I remember visiting her when I was pretty young and seeing the gowns hanging from doors...gorgeous fabrics and colors. I never got to see them worn, but I knew they were not to be touched by young hands. Perhaps that's why I enjoy touching fabrics so much these days.

And I'm sharing this with Sepia Saturday this week. I can't match this prompt, but figure having a nice old photo might let me sneak in.
What old photos (sepia or otherwise) might you wish to share?