Goodrich Nursing Home in Lexington, Kentucky. My Aunt Lil’s nursing home, run about 1940-1960? Not sure about the dates. Aunt Lil is in the dark dress at the bottom of the photo.

This is a great photo of my Aunt Lil and her nursing staff at the Goodrich Nursing Home in Lexington, Kentucky.  Aunt Lil, actually my great-aunt, was born Lillian Catherine Montgomery, March 11, 1900 – always easy to remember old she was – in Washington County, the daughter of Robert E. Lee Montgomery and Frances Barber Linton.  She married Guy Goodrich in 1933.  They had no children, but Aunt Lil devoted her time as a registered nurse, a graduate of St. Joseph Hospital School of Nursing in Lexington.  She began Goodrich Nursing Home and ran it with an iron fist.  Patients always came first.  She was a stickler for cleanliness and demanded superior work from her staff.  She was well known in this field, and well loved by those who worked for her.

I have very vague memories of visiting Aunt Lil and Uncle Guy’s home in Lexington – I always thought it very fancy!  I particularly remember her plates with pink flowers and green leaves in her china hutch.  In later years, after Uncle Guy passed on and she sold the nursing home, she returned to Springfield, in Washington County, and lived near her sister – my grandmother.  It was at this point our relationship grew, since the genealogy bug had been handed down to her, from her mother – and also handed down to me from the same, my great-grandmother.  As far as I know, we were the only two in the family so obsessed!  I would visit her for lunch and we would pore over all the delicate pieces of paper of our ancestors, handed down through the years, and look at those faces in photographs of so long ago.  Sometimes I miss her so!

Aunt Lil was rather a roving senior citizen.  She would move to Springfield, be there several years; miss Lexington; move there for several years, miss Springfield, and move back.  Torn between two worlds.  In her last years she lived in a nursing home in Springfield, but acted like she was the one taking care of things.  I suppose once a nurse, always a nurse!

Do you recognize any of the nurses in the photo?