My grandma's recipe is credited to "Mrs. Robert Hale". Her name was Evelyn.
My mom lent me her battered church cookbook from the 70s because I've been trying to make my grandma's lemon cake. Her recipes are in there, and so are several from women who lived on my mom's street when she was little.
Nearly every married woman is listed by her husband's full name, with "Mrs." in front. My grandpa never baked, but his full name is on three recipes. I knew people used to do this. I hadn't really thought about what it means when you want to look up a woman fifty years later.
Mom recognized a few, so we started putting first names on sticky notes. Others she could remember by their house or whose kids she played with, but not their names. There's one woman whose potato salad she still talks about, and we can't even put a first name to her.
I was only going to scan a few recipes for my cousins before the pages fall out. Now I'm making an index of the contributors and asking the church whether they kept any old membership lists. I'll keep the original scans too, but I'd like the searchable version to actually identify the people who contributed.
Has anyone had to dig through family records like this? What helped you find the women when they kept being recorded under someone else's name?