1920s Family Paper Dolls

This family of the 1920s has no living grandfather. Grandmother Tracy's husband Hal had died in the great influenza epidemic of 1918. Tracy, who is 60, supported herself and her nine children (the oldest of whom is Mary Lou) by selling produce from a small truck farm, doing fine needlework for the local department store and renting a couple of houses that she built with the profits from her first two endeavors. Grandmother Bertie was widowed when her husband was killed in France in World War I. She supported herself and her son John by becoming a saleswoman and then the fashion buyer for the principal dress store in town. Mother Mary Lou went to business school and became a secretary, but quit to raise a family. Mary Lou and her husband John have five children. Kathy, 18, has just graduated from high school and is engaged to be married to Patrick. Sharon is 16 and has a crush on Patrick's younger brother Brad. Tom is 12 and likes to draw and paint. Hal is seven and wants to be a carpenter. Marianne is six and wants to be a ballerina.

1930s Family Paper Dolls

Grandfather Walter owns a laundry, which he and his older brother started when they were young. Walter was a widower with two sons, Patrick, a manager at the laundry, and Bradley (Brad), a senior in college. After several years alone, Walter met and married JoAnn, who had two teenaged children of her own, Shannon, a senior in high school, and Scott, already in college. Patrick married his high school sweetheart, Kathy, and they have three children, Deirdre, five, Bridget, nine, and Brandon, seven. Both JoAnn and Kathy are housewives, but JoAnn makes extra "pin money" by doing fancy sewing and needlework for friends and neighbors. She and Kathy make almost all of their own and the children's clothing.