My Aunt Marion, older sister of my father, told me a good many years ago that my dad’s mother had come from a family whose relatives had enough money to give expensive wedding gifts and she got many pieces of silver. When my father was a child, his mother developed TB and to help pay doctor bills, his father gave the silver pieces to the doctor as pay, saving only two items.

I don’t know what Aunt Marion got but my dad got the teapot in question. It is one of my earliest memories and it had even then a place near the bottom that had had the silver melted. My mother said she left it on a wood burning stove.

I don’t remember her ever using it or showing much interest in it. After she died and I got it, I used it a few times but eventually it began to leak at the seam where it had melted on the hot stove. It is packed away somewhere and I must look for it and see if anything can be done with it as my daughter-in-law Anne mentioned once that she would like to have it someday.

My dad always said that he was 8 years old and Marion was 16 when their mother died. Since he was born in 1896, that would make it 1904 when she died but I think the records you sent showed she died in 1903. That discrepancy would be very easily understood as he might not have been exactly 8.

The family moved about a lot while his mother was sick as one of the treatments for TB then was to move the patient to a warm place with lots of sunshine and I remember him telling about living in Texas (where they bought tamales from a street vendor) and also living in San Diego. Possibly also in Arizona but can’t remember.