GRANDMA EDNA  (First Born Daughter)

When you start talking about family, where do you begin.  I have studied and searched for family information almost all of my life and I hope that you enjoy reading about our family both good times and bad.

We have kind of a unique lineage.  First born daughters.  Starting with Grandma Edna, my mom Evalyn, myself, Sandy, my oldest daughter Marie, her oldest daughter Ashley and Ashley's daughter Maycee.

Both of my grandmothers would sit with me for hours and talk about our family.  As a small child I use to take notes and when I was a teenager my Grandma Edna and I would visit my great uncles and ask all kinds of questions.  She was my foot in the door type of person.

I don't think that my Grandma Edna had a very easy childhood.  I feel that she was always striving for her mothers love and attention. Times were hard back then and do to difficult situations she was raised by her grandparents. Even though she was happy there and had a fairly good home, I always had this feeling that she felt something was missing.

She was a real trouper though or maybe because I was little and she was my grandma I felt that she was just so special.  She had eight children, raising seven and giving the youngest son up to the angels.

I know that life was hard during the 20's and 30's and it really didn't seem that easy for her during the 50's when I was growing up, but she had a way about her that always included me in her daily tasks.  She taught me how to make bread, roll out a noodle, soft bowl an egg, make jelly and those darn oatmeal cookies with pounds and pounds of raisens in them. As children we loved those cookies but my cousin Butch and I would sit on the porch and sometimes pick out the raisin's and feed them to the chickens. Then we would laugh and laugh at how little cookie we had left.  How simple things were back then. Grandma made things fun.

I could go on and on about my visits to the farm during the summers and how I was normally packed long before the last day of school and I'm sure as my memory hits me I will write about my adventures with my Grandma Edna.

I sometime wonder how my children and grandchildren would make do with the little we had at a visit to Grandma's.  Heaven forbid, no cell phones, she had a 16 family party line telephone which was separated into 4 different sections so that the telephone would ring 1-4 times in each home, but if you wanted to call out you had to make sure that one of the other 15 users wasn't on the line. Then it was nothing to have someone interrupt your conversation to ask a question on some particular item that you were talking about.  Everyone did it, and no one seemed to care about the meaning of a private conversation.

There were no DVD's, internet, computers, X-boxes or big screen TV's.  She had a little black and white television with a 12 inch screen that had an antenna mounted to the house that if you were lucky would bring in two or three stations. We only watched it on Sunday afternoons if it was raining and we couldn't go outside and for some reason a lot of my cousins would show up on that Sunday evening every year that The Wizard of Oz was playing and we would shut ourselves up in the living room, turn out the lights and watch the movie.  It was wonderful!

Those were simple days and I only hope that my grandchildren have as fond of memories of me as I have of her.

Thanks for stopping by.