Ada Who?

My childhood best friend sent me an email a few minutes ago that made me aware of a neat cause for the day. 

Today is Ada Lovelace Day.   I must confess, I had to click on the “Who was Ada?” tab.  While I know several women in technology, there’s one to whom I ALWAYS turn when I have my own little techno-snafu – Monica.  

Go ahead, click on the links and learn about Ada and her day.  I hope it does become an annual event, and next year, I’ll plan a proper post.

And because I know you like photos and stories, here’s my own Ada.  She was my maternal grandmother’s sister.  I remember her sense of humor, her elegance and her smile, which ran clean up into her eyes.   It’s a cropped version of a scanned photo that I do believe was taken with an old 110 version camera, probably from the 20th century. 

Just take a gander at what I didn’t crop.  Here’s this LADY – in every sense of the word – sitting in her rather standard attire, at a picnic, in a shelter, just off the water.   What you can’t see is that she’s encircled by her family.  She was widowed before my earliest memory of her, but I can’t ever recall seeing Aunt Ada sit alone, except when I stayed with her and she got up before I did in the mornings, and I’d come out to find her reading her Bible or working a puzzle.

No, I don’t know that she qualifies as a woman in technology, but she was a school teacher in a little one-room school in central Virginia.  Her life nearly touched THREE different centuries, and I’m sure that like her sister, she too was in awe of the changes that happened in her lifetime.  Just for starters, when their father died just before my grandmother was born, his death was caused by an accident on his way home from the seminary; he was thrown from his horse and died.  But before her death, my Ada saw the space shuttle, and the daughter inlaw she lived with had a computer, I do believe.

I’ve always liked the name Ada.  I’m positive my Ada would love to see Ada Lovelace Day take its place on the calendar, reminding all the world that a woman was behind the computers that run the world.