Colección T-TOO - Helen Tooker papers

Helen Tooker was born in Attleboro, Massachusetts, in the United States of America. Having studied art with a local painter in her teenage years, she then trained for a year at the Boston Museum School of Art before marrying and starting a family. Following her husband's death during the Great Depression, Helen supported her five children by working as a professional artist. Her work embraced many media, including sign painting and billboards, sculpture, calligraphy and fine portraiture. From 1947 until her death in 1998, she lived in Florida.

Helen Tooker had a lifelong interest in family history. Around 1955, she began working on a series of 23 richly illustrated charts incorporating the genealogical information she had collected over the years. These charts purportedly trace the ancestry of Helen’s parents, Emily White Perkins and Harry Landon Tooker, back into early English, Irish and Scottish history.