Mother’s Day ain’t what it used to be.
The family of Anna Jarvis, the holiday’s founder, are following in their ancestor’s footsteps — by refusing to recognize the controversial date.
Jarvis, born in 1864, wanted moms to have a deeply personal day to celebrate them. Her vision for the holiday was to be a tribute to “the best mother who ever lived: yours.”
But as the day started to become more commercialized, the woman from Webster, West Virginia, spent her final years, blind and broke, campaigning against the holiday with lawsuits to reclaim what the day initially stood for.
Today, Richard Talbott Miller Jr. and Elizabeth Burr, Jarvis’ first cousins three times removed, are upholding the activist’s stance against Mother’s Day, though they only recently discovered their link to Jarvis thanks to an intrepid geneologist from MyHeritage, who sought to find out if the holiday’s creator had any living kin.
When Burr first received a call from a researcher at MyHeritage, she “thought it was a scam.”
“But once I realized it was real, it was amazing.”
Jarvis set out to establish Mother’s Day after the death of her own mother, whose dream it was to see such a holiday become a reality — so Jarvis honored hers by doing just that.
And in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill making Jarvis’ Mother’s Day a national holiday.
As the date transformed into a so-called “Hallmark holiday,” Jarvis couldn’t stand the monster she created — she hated the flower arrangements, greeting cards and expensive chocolates, CNN reported.
She called those who profited from Mother’s Day “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites.”
“This is the wrong spirit,” Jarvis told the Miami Daily News in a heated interview in 1924.
Even though she spent years campaigning Congress to get the holiday national recognition, she started protesting florists for the marked-up and excessive floral arrangements, which eventually led to her arrest for public disturbances.
She then went directly after First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for co-opting the holiday to promote the health and welfare of women and children, even though Jarvis’ mother was also a community health advocate.
Jarvis never married or had children before passing away in 1948 — but her only known living relatives have been uncovered by researchers at MyHeritage.
Turns out, they’re not fans of Mother’s Day either.
It was long believed that her family line had ended, but using census records, family trees and historical documents, a genealogist was able to trace her extended family line through her aunt, Margaret Jane Jarvis Strickler.
This led them to Maryland siblings Miller and Burr.
Burr and her aunt, Jane Unkefer, told the researchers that their family never celebrated Mother’s Day the way the rest of the world does now to honor of their ancestor’s vision.
“We really didn’t like Mother’s Day,” Unkefer said. “We acknowledged it as a nice sentiment, but we didn’t go in for the fancy dinner or bouquets.”
“Our mother always said, ‘Every day is Mother’s Day.’”
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