She got it from her (great-great-grand) mama.
When Abby Kingston got engaged to her fiancé, Jason Curtis, last September, she didn't have to look far to find a wedding dress.
Abby Kingston
For the past 70 or so years, there's been a tradition among the women of her family to wed in her great-great-grandmother Mary Lowry Warren's dress from her 1895 wedding.
"When I was younger, while I was playing piano at my parents' house, there was a framed picture of the first six brides wearing the dress, so I would think, 'Someday,'" Kingston told BuzzFeed Life.
Once she got engaged, she told her mother Leslie she wanted to try to track it down. Leslie also wore the gown, so she was all for the idea.
Abby Kingston
The tradition actually took 50 years to start because Lowry's own daughters had no interest in wearing the dress.
(Above, the second bride, Jane Woodruff, wears the dress for her Feb. 20, 1946, wedding to John Kearns.)
Lowry's daughter got married in the ’20s and wanted a flapper-style dress, Kingston said. It was Lowry's granddaughter who first re-wore the OG gown. There was a lull for parts of the '50s and '60s, but the custom got rolling again by the time Kingston's mother got married.
Abby Kingston
Over the years, the two-piece dress had largely remained the same.
(The above photo is from Virginia Woodruff's Oct. 13, 1948, wedding to Douglas MacConnell.)
Kingston estimates that 90–95% of the dress she will wear to her Oct. 17 wedding is original.
Abby Kingston
