Sibling Saturday: Annie and Elizabeth Dickson

Elizabeth Dickson (left) and sister Annie Dickson (right)

In the genealogy blogging world, there are certain "prompts" that are used to generate posts, and they're often associated with days of the week.  "Sibling Saturday" is one of these prompts, and today I'd like to share a little bit about two women in our family tree, Annie and Elizabeth Dickson.

Elizabeth Davock Dickson was the sister of our great-great-grandmother Anne "Annie" Amelia Dickson.  We are related to them through Grandma's father, George Rutherfurd.  Annie was his mother and Elizabeth was his aunt.

The Dickson family came to America in 1837 from Enniskillen in Co. Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.  However, Grandma always stressed to me that this family was originally Scottish, and they didn't spend many generations in Northern Ireland before moving on to America.  They did not consider themselves Irish.  I am still trying to determine where in Scotland this family might have originated.  The Dicksons settled in Buffalo, New York, where our ancestor William Dickson and his sons were employed as sailors and ship captains.  William's son George then moved the family to Canada, just north of Detroit.  The Dickson men were ship captains on the Great Lakes.  Annie was born in Sarnia, Ontario (1870) and Elizabeth was born in Point Edward, Ontario (1868).  They had three other siblings, Mary, George Jr. and Wilfred. 

Elizabeth studied nursing in Detroit, and Grandma told me that she also went to New York to train as a surgical nurse.  At some point, when Elizabeth and Annie were young adults, one of their brothers took a job working in a telegraph office in Douglas, Wyoming.  Their parents, George and Mary Bellangee Dickson, decided to follow him there.  Elizabeth went, too, and there she helped found and build the hospital in Douglas.  Annie followed later, after her brief marriage to George Rutherfurd's father (John Griffin) ended in divorce.  In Douglas, Annie met and married Malcolm Rutherfurd, who adopted her son George.  They went on to have four more boys.  Elizabeth never married, and spent her life working in the hospital.  She was known fondly to Grandma as "Auntie" and was close with her family until she died in 1952.