#52Ancestors #Week13 Light a Candle

 As a person with a genealogist’s obsession with history, I often think that I must have been born in the wrong time, but then I enter mortality details, of disease that is now rare or non-existent, or of someone gone too soon, and thing again. I’m right where I’m supposed to be. If the plague hadn’t taken me out, surely the amount of grief wouldn’t have been survivable.

We’re meant to light at least a metaphorical candle this week.  Today I’m going to light 4 tiny little candles, for my Granny Greenwell (my Grandma’s Grandma, whom lived with them and who is remembered fondly for her recipes and her ability to keep her family together), and whom I never knew, but I think of often when thinking of the words “survivor” and “fortitude”

Granny was born Mary Alice Elizabeth Pfeffer, and called Bettie. Her parents had owned some property due to circumstances unknown, sold off what little they had, moved to Missouri where they were known to have been poor sharecroppers, and Bettie’s father and youngest sister died in an epidemic in 1899. Just a month later, Bettie was married. Necessity, as she was the second oldest child?  Certainly a possibility.

George and Bettie had a baby girl during the week of Thanksgiving, 1899. She lived only 3 weeks and was probably buried in the churchyard in town. Such tremendous loss inside 10 months!  

During the next 8 years, the couple had 3 more girls and their first son. Evelyn, followed by Pauline, then Bill and Hazel.  In the autumn, right around the time Bettie would learn she was expecting Bill, little Pauline died.  She was probably about a year old, as no birth or death record exists and she likely came about 12-18 months after Evelyn.  

Life went on in the Bootheel of Missouri, and George and Bettie eventually had 7 more children, 3 sons and 4 daughters.  In February 1915, diphtheria was at large in the community, taking newborn Burnice. Then in the fall of 1918, 1 year old Christine was an early area victim of what would later be known as the Spanish Flu Epidemic.  Bettie wasn’t yet 40 when she gave birth to her last child the following February.

I have been told many times how Granny Greenwell called the names of her 4 daughters when she was at daughter Hazel’s home in 1949, receiving her own last rites. Some family members telling this story are incredulous, “imaging remembering those little babies for so long!”  I think, I can’t imagine ever forgetting their faces!  And longing for decades to be reunited with them.

So today I light a candle for each of Granny’s little angels, because they have not been lost to history, their names are written for posterity:

Sue Ella Greenwell 🕯️ 

Pauline Cecelia Greenwell 🕯️ 

Lucy Burnice Greenwell 🕯️ 

Eva Sally Christine Greenwell 🕯️