My Other Grandmother

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For many reasons, I knew very little about my paternal grandmother, Annie Elizabeth, when I was growing up. My father, her fifth child, was nearly 13 years older than my mother, and I cannot remember him ever talking about his childhood. His mother died in 1945, two years before I was born, and his father in 1940.

We were very rich in time with and knowledge about our mother’s side of the family, and it was not until quite recently that I started delving into the vast storehouse of information online to learn more about the grandmother I never knew.

Annie Elizabeth’s grandparents were born in the South — Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia — but had moved west to Missouri, where her parents were born. She was the middle child of five, four of whom survived childhood, and the only daughter. Her two older brothers, George and David, were a bank president in Iowa and a chief agricultural agent for the US Department of Agriculture in Puerto Rico, respectively. Her younger brother Benjamin owned a drug store in Iowa; her baby brother, Frank, died at age 4.

Her paternal grandfather was a doctor, as was her father, and Annie Elizabeth married a doctor, EdwinH, when she was 21 and he was 23. The son of a successful farmer and his wife, EdwinH was one of eleven children, two of whom became physicians and another two became dentists.

Annie Elizabeth’s and EdwinH’s first child, also named Edwin, was born in 1895; he died at age 3-1/2. Nine months before his death, their daughter Julia was born, followed three years later by another son, Ben, both seen here with their father. Another three years passed; son George was born, but died at age 15 months. My father, David, was born in 1906, followed by their last child, Howard, born in 1910.

Of Annie Elizabeth’s four children who reached maturity, only two — her daughter Julia and my father — had children. Julia had four sons, all of whom would have known their grandparents in their childhoods. My father had a daughter in 1926 with his first wife, and three daughters with his second wife, my mother, beginning in the late 1940s.

Julia lived to age 90; her brothers did not fare so well. Ben was 62 when he died, my father was 53, and Howard was 37. Annie Elizabeth missed the sorrow of learning that her two younger sons took their own lives — Howard in 1948 and my father in 1960, a few days before my 13th birthday, leaving my mother, age 40, with three young daughters to raise on her own.

Looking at Annie Elizabeth’s portrait, I can see some of my own characteristics in her face, and I wish that I knew more about her — what her childhood was like as the only daughter in her family, what subjects she enjoyed at school, what her interests were as an adult, whether she liked to read as much as I do, and so many more questions, never to be answered.