Annie Young, the Notman doodler

The theme of this year’s Women’s History Month is #BecauseOfHer to recognize and appreciate the significant achievements and contributions of women who have helped shape Canada.

Because of Annie Young, who is my first cousin three times removed, and two other female ancestors, more than 200 photos of my family were taken between 1862 and 1935 at the William Notman photographic studio in Montreal. Notman’s collection of more than 400,000 photos is now maintained and preserved at McCord Museum in Montreal.

This is Annie’s story.

On two book shelves in the McCord Museum library in downtown Montreal sit 43 large, bound copies of handwritten indexes that list the names of thousands of people who were photographed between 1856 and 1935 in the Montreal studio of internationally known Scottish-born photographer William Notman. At the top of one of the last pages in Volume 9, the index for the years 1880 to 1883, a young employee playfully doodled and signed her name, Annie M. Young.

Annabella “Annie” Mary Young was 17 years old in 1878 when she began working at the Notman and Sandham photographic studio on Bleury Street in what is known today as Old Montreal. As an artist, her starting salary was $6 every two weeks, equivalent to about $140 today. Her duties may have included writing entries in index books, colouring prints, pasting prints onto mounts, or helping clients change into costumes.

Annie was born in Montreal on July 13, 1861, the only child of Scottish immigrants George Young, a bookkeeper, and his wife Elizabeth Webster. Annie’s young father had died four months before her birth, and perhaps that is why she spent most of her life surrounded by her large extended family.

Until she married, Annie and her mother lived with her maternal grandparents and uncles on St. Alexander Street, a short walk from the Notman studio, in a two-storey brick dwelling that housed two other families. Only two doors away, Annie’s paternal grandparents and several aunts and uncles lived in a similar home.

First photo
Annie first sat for a Notman photographer when she was 11 years old. During the next three decades, Annie would sit for more than 30 photos in that studio, eventually becoming the most photographed by Notman among her relatives.

Annie Young, 1872, Montreal, Quebec. Photographer: William Notman, BI-73701.

Annie Young and her mother Elizabeth Young (née Webster), 1875, Montreal, Quebec. Photographer: William Notman, II-20331.1.

Increase of family photos
When Annie ended her employment at Notman and Sandham, she was 20 years old and earning $4 a week. During the three years she had worked there, an unusually high number of Young family members had visited the studio for a portrait. In fact, more than 50 photos were taken of Annie’s mother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and her, suggesting employees may have benefitted from a discount.

Annie’s departure from the studio did not mean the end of the Youngs’ connection to Notman. Within a very short time, Annie’s aunt, Mary Fyvie Young, filled the vacancy. Many years later, a widowed cousin, Amy Haire (née Young), would also work there.

Marriage
On December 21, 1881, six weeks after leaving her job, Annie married James Stewart Reed, a custom broker from Montreal who worked for his father’s firm. Before the next spring, the couple returned to the Notman and Sandham studio to pose together, possibly to commemorate their marriage. They would return the following year for another joint portrait.

Stewart Reed and Annie Reed (née Young), March 16, 1882, Montreal, Quebec. Photographer: Notman and Sandham, BII-64294-1. McCord Museum, Montreal.

Last photo
There would be a 15-year gap before a prematurely gray, 38-year-old Annie and her husband posed together again. This would be the last time Annie sat for a Notman photographer.

For more than 50 years of their married life, Annie and Stewart lived in a duplex in the Plateau district, a working class neighbourhood in Montreal. By 1935, both in their 70s, they moved a few kilometres west to Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, a primarily English-speaking neighbourhood. They never had any children.

Annie passed away at the age of 77 on February 18, 1939, after having spent her final days as a patient at the Montreal Homeopathic Hospital. Her husband died four years later.

Unmarked grave
Apart from paper records, there is nothing to mark the exact spot where Annie and her husband are buried in the large Reed family plot in Mount Royal Cemetery. In her final resting place, there is no evidence of the woman whose life was richly documented in photographs and who left her mark in an old index book.

Because of her
Because of Annie and her work as a photographer’s artist, her image and the images of her family, and thousands of others have been preserved for generations.

More than 82,000 photos from the Notman Photographic Archives are available online and searchable on the McCord Museum website.

You can read more of my ancestors’ stories here.