Although myth that she had undergone sex change surgery made it into a 1983 official history of Cornwall, the Library and Archives Canada's feature on women's hockey debunks it. The story follows that after her operation, she returned to the Cornwall area as a man, "Albert Smythe", ran a garage and got married. However, her mother's obituary in 1929 lists her as a living daughter, as does a 1940 profile of her father, which details she married a man named Albert Schmidt from New York. Further refuting the theory was the fact that sex reassignment operations did not take place until after the Second World War.