This postcard sent to Annie Griffin in 1908 displays a view of the Steamship Alberta. What's with her and boat postcards? The boat was part of Canadian Pacific Railway Great Lakes fleet, built in Scotland in 1883, it sailed the upper lakes carrying freight and passengers on Lake Huron and Superior till being converted to freight only in 1916. The boat was sold off in 1946, by then thoroughly obsolete, I would think.
Trainweb.org has the whole story of Canadian Pacific's steamships here.
More importantly the Annie Griffins story continues, no news on the Willis situation but what to do with tomato pickles?
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Poor Flossie never got the slips she had so coveted. She died, of all things, on October 12, 1908 -- just hours before the so-called "Annie Griffiths" (actually Erata Simphorn, a grifter originally from Cobalt, ON) wrote this alibi-creating card to herself.
Flossie crossed over unexpectedly after administering the beating her slatternly neighbor, Zelpha "Boom Boom" Holtz, had been begging for over a period of weeks. Doctor Fahey said she took a massive infarction and that was all they wrote. Fahey said she had felt no pain, but for all his assurances no one could look for long on her cold dead face. Well, hers was always a face to terrify children, even in repose.
Between the excitement of "Annie"'s homecoming and the feverish negotiations between Zoroastria, family lawyer Geoffroy Peets, and Father Squillies (who initially refused Flossie burial in the consecrated churchyard at St. Ranulph's), the tomato pickles were pushed to one side and quickly forgotten. They languished -- six gallon jars' worth of them -- on the side porch steps for more than three weeks; then they were stolen, along with an ornamentally carved crutch of unknown provenance, by tramps.
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