I'm participating in the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge started by Amy Johnson Crow, professional genealogist. Each week we use a new prompt as a theme. This week’s theme is strong women.
Just a few facts from the lives of some of my Strong Women ancestors:
Grace - Mom loved kids and had six and was pregnant with the seventh when her husband, the love of her life, was killed in a tractor accident. Five years earlier, their third child died of pneumonia as they rushed her to the doctor.
Lizzie - Lizzie lived through two depressions, 1890s and 1930s. In the 1890s, the family of six or seven children were nearly out of food before provisions arrived. In her 20’s, she homesteaded in the sandhills, living in a straw bale house while she proved up her claim.
Flora - Six months pregnant, Flora climbed into a wagon in Iowa with her husband, parents, two toddlers and all their possessions and headed to the west side of Loup county, Nebraska. She gave birth two months later in a tent. She had 13 babies, buried five as infants and two as young adults. Her father died in the Civil War.
Eunice - Flora’s mother kept the family and farm together when Charles left to fight in the Civil War. She made decisions about hiring a hired man, “how much corn you think you will have and how many hogs you are a going to fatten and how many cattle you are a going to winter and who gets wood for you and whether you have got the spokes hauld (sic) or not…” (Letter from Charles to Eunice dated 13 December 1862.) Charles was about 35 when he left to fight and he died 5 months later of illness. Charles and Eunice had 5 children whom Eunice had to get guardianship of through the courts. She remarried and joined Flora and George on the trip to Nebraska. Eunice was 31 when she applied for a widow’s pension.
Rachel - Not much is known about Rachel, except that her husband Aaron was ill and unable to work for two years before he died, leaving several children still at home, the youngest of whom was 11 years old.
Ann - Born in England, Ann survived the trip across the ocean with husband John and son William who was about a year old. William died between ages 5 and 15, and gaps in the ages of the other children suggest there were babies who were born and died that we have no information about. She traveled to Nebraska with George and Flora and may have been ill during the journey. She died one month after they arrived.
Alvina - She was born in Wales to an unmarried mother, but the man her mother married a few years later may have been her biological father. She came on a boat to America, settling with her family first in Pennsylvania and then moving with her husband, parents, and children to Missouri. John was a coal miner and they moved back and forth from Missouri to Illinois and Ohio. John was most likely an alcoholic. Alvina suffered from “bone erysipelas” or perhaps varicose veins. She died at age 51.
Jane - She was a single mom to Alvina before marrying Daniel. They had one more child before leaving Wales and coming to America. She lived to be 95 years old.
Della - A widow with 5 children, she married her hired man and had 4 more children. He decided to live separately from Della, coming home “only often enough to get her pregnant,” according to two of their children. She relied on her sons, especially Hugh, to make a living for her and Hugh’s siblings from the time he was very young. She was treasurer on the local one-room school board.
Elida - She moved away from family in Iowa to Nebraska and then Missouri. She had 7 children, one who died as an infant. She suffered sometimes from “heart palpitations” and died at age 44 of pneumonia. She was a woman of strong Christian faith and encouraged her children’s education, especially her daughter’s. One daughter graduated from nursing school in 1904 and another, after returning from Africa as a missionary, got her master’s degree in her 50s.
Mary Alice - She and her husband moved to Hamilton county, Nebraska, and took out a homestead. She, like other of our ancestors, lived in a sod house. They eventually moved to Wyoming.
Melissa - The only story I know about Melissa is that when she died, age 80, the river between where she lived and the nearest town 7 1/2 miles away was flooded, so her son went to a neighbors farm 3 miles away, and from there walked to Salina on the Union Pacific railroad tracks to purchase a casket. The casket was sent out on a boat to be ferried from Salina to the neighbor’s place where her son would pick it up.
Stories like these are why I do family history.