#5Ancestors #Week33 - Strength

There are so many different ways to approach this week's challenge, but the topic that consistently stands out to me are the Women Who Came Before.  I could and may continue in this vein at a later date as well. When I'm doodling, or contemplating embroidery or a new tattoo, I sometimes make a list of the names who came before. Strong women, in ways known to me and other ways that I'm sure were taken to their grave, as most of us have some things we never share.

On my mother's side, my generations of grandmothers are:

Catherine

Hazel

Winifred Bridget

Bettie and Florence

Eldora and Kate

On my dad's side:

Margaret (and honorable mention to her sister Dorothy)

Elsie

Lulu

Maggie and Dirkje

Jennie and Anna

I've counted, and if I include my mother, all of us have given birth to a whopping total of 97 children. Kate and Bettie had twelve each, one was Irish, both were Catholic. Maggie had 11 children, born across 2 countries and her youngest daughter born in an actual cave in North Dakota. The older generations above all buried small children (I don't know if this is true for Jennie), and Hazel lost a daughter at 17. Kate lost an infant daughter and a 20 year old daughter, and Florence had a son that went on the lam at age 20 and never returned. That kind of loss is rare now, and we tell ourselves that we don't know how we could survive it.  They carried on.

All of us with the exception of myself and possibly Dirkje have worked on a farm or at least done some significant farm chores at some point in their lives. I've never had the experience, but my step-grandparents lived on a farm in their retirement, and I have seen a farm in action and had some fun experiences there. It certainly isn't anything as romantic as Little House on the Prairie or the Waltons would have had me believe. I have newspaper articles and research by a cousin outlining farm sales, near bankruptcy, photos and tallies of crops that had to be tended and gathered without machines, and homes cut from the very sod they sat upon. Farms that experienced flood, drought and tornados, one tornado leaving Eldora an invalid for many years before her death. Anna was enumerated as a laborer in Norway, living away from her single mother while a teen - Anna is believed to have been an only child.

Most of the above women saw the advent of the automobile, and what they must have thought! Jennie was recently widowed and moved from the farm to the city at about the time that cars were becoming more popular, and I imagine the challenges were exacerbated by the noise alone. Bettie's son Bill was the first in that family to own his own car, and it traveled from Missouri to Wisconsin and back more than a few times, once with his mother, siblings and all of their worldly possessions. My grandma was small when she saw their arrival but remembered that "it looked like a clown car with all of those people pouring out."

Catherine, Hazel, Winifred, Margaret, Elsie, Lulu and myself, we've all watched husbands or sons pack their things, get into their uniforms and go to war. Letters, the occasional phone call, sending packages. The sleepless nights, the news, both good and bad. The loneliness, and the adjustment when they come home, and after. We've had candles, yellow ribbons and lapel pins. We've had the prayers of our friends and families. I see you brave ladies, and I wrap my arms around you. We too, have served.

Maggie, Dirkje and Anna arrived in a foreign country without the ability to speak the language. They all had the benefit of large immigrant communities in the same circumstances. For Anna, although her husband's arrival preceded hers by 2 years, she had no family nearby. My Dutch ancestors had thankfully been here for a number of years before the government began enacting anti-German edicts including bans on speaking their language. We are not German, but Dutch, but Dutch was "close enough" for the US Government and often included in these bans. The language survived in that my grandmother Margaret and her siblings started school (the eldest was 6 just as WWI started) with no English, as they simply didn't speak it at home. I am sad that by the time I was interested in learning a phrase or two, my grandmother didn't remember much of her first language. I know only a few words.

Bettie, Kate and Jennie lost husbands at what today would be considered perilously young ages (edit - I hadn't noticed before writing this that they were all the same age):

Bettie's husband was a farmer and reportedly all-around good guy who had been kicked in the head by a mule about 2 years prior to his death. He has been reported by an elderly cousin and a newspaper report to have "not been the same since" and while they didn't have the terminology for a TBI, he was also reported by another cousin to have been somewhat depressed afterward. George was found by a man he was doing business with and by his 3 teenage sons, hanging from the rafters in his hay barn. He was 49, and left his wife, 8 children (his two eldest daughters had married the year prior, both had newborns and lived in the family home) not to mention the affairs of the farm. His brother Robert helped to pick up the pieces.

Kate's husband was ill from severe dysentery contracted during his Civil War service, which resulted in later rheumatism. He was also thought to have injured himself while working on his farm prior to heading into town to fulfill jury duty. He was active in many civic positions and was well known and respected, and when the trial was over, he was brought to the home of the defendant in the case (who had lost) as he was quite ill and needed to rest before his 20-mile journey home. He quickly deteriorated, and lost consciousness. It was not recorded if he was able to say goodbye to his family, who arrived before his passing. Patrick was also 49 years old. He left his widow, 11 living children, many still at home (son Tom was 5), and the affairs of a mortgaged farm for his family to settle.

Jennie's husband, also a farmer, was not a well-to-do man. He had been an orphan and was separated from his siblings at a young age, and all of those siblings seem to have lost touch with one another, although 2 sisters lived in the (not immediate) area. He and Jennie, who lived near her family, rented their farm, and the only mentions of them in their very busy community papers were at his death. He and some of the neighbors, and possibly one of his children, had influenza in the early spring of 1899, and Charles (often called by his middle name Perry) died one month before his 49th birthday. His wife and seven children stayed in Cherokee County for a few years before moving to Sioux City.

All of these women raised families who remembered them fondly (and sometimes not as fondly, because we are human), who passed down their photos (Jennie is the only one that I've never seen a photo of) and their recipes and tales about how they lived. Most have namesakes, even Eldora, which tickles me as relatively unusual. I admire them all, because they all persevered, and without any of them, I certainly wouldn't be here. I do in fact have both Margaret and Elsie's names in a tattoo, because we are breast cancer survivors. 

My grandmothers Margaret and Catherine lived to "ripe old age." Both survived all of their siblings (Catherine was the oldest, Margaret was the youngest). Both had Alzheimer's disease, but not before they had the opportunity to raise families who loved them and love back, see the world (a little), work, laugh (a lot) and adore their grandchildren.