DeBlois, Edith Marion, 1920-2000, collector.

Edith Marion Gladney was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1920, the daughter of native Canadian Eva Elizabeth Powis and Englishman Reginald Gladney. She called herself "Babs" as a child, which she modified to "Babbie" in later life. Her parents divorced when in 1933, and her mother later married A. E. D. Tremain of Montreal.

Edith Gladney was very interested in foreign travel as a young girl, but her first opportunity came at the age of nineteen, when she visited the New York World's Fair. The outbreak of World War II a few months later caused her parents to abandon plans to send her to finishing school in Switzerland, so she took a nursing course and spent most of the war working in a munitions factory as an inspector. In 1945 she married Howard Crawford DeBlois, a wounded veteran of the Royal Engineers and moved to the industrial city of Shawinigan, about 100 miles from Montreal. Howard DeBlois died in 1948, and Edith and their daughter remained in Shawinigan living on his pension.

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