Bertha and Ruth Edgerton were born to Alfred and Jane Edgerton of Cedar Creek, Lake County, Indiana. Bertha, born around the year 1867, was about ten years the senior of her younger sister, Ruth, who was born about 1877. The Edgerton sisters had an additional three brothers and three sisters: Oscar, Nora, George, Millie, Homer, and Alma.
The elder sister Bertha was active in Sunday school. In the year 1884, at the age of seventeen, Bertha participated in the Lake County Sunday School Union's nineteenth anniversary celebration. At the event she was one of three young women to give a recitation to the audience; her selection was "Two Banners."
The younger of the Edgerton sisters, Ruth, married Jarvis Dorais, a Canadian of French background, and moved to Muskegon, Michigan, sometime prior to 1910. In Michigan, Ruth Edgerton Dorais started a family which included daughter Flora Lois Dorais, who later took the name Lois Dorais Potter following her marriage. Lois Dorais Potter's daughter, Lois Potter, donated these scrapbooks to the University of Delaware Library in 2008.
Ball, T.H. The Sunday Schools of Lake: an account of the commencement and growth of the Sunday Schools of Lake County, Indiana, from about 1840 to 1890. Crown Point, Indiana: Lake County S. S. Union, 1891. Available online at http://www.usgwarchives.org/special/churches/in/lake/sundayschools.htm (accessed August 11, 2008). Additional information derived from conversations with Lois Potter and from the United States Census for the years 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910, and 1920.
From the guide to the Bertha and Ruth Edgerton scrapbooks, 1880s-1920s, (University of Delaware Library - Special Collections)
