Week 11: Luck
I'm a week behind: due to the world's bad luck in the emergence of this coronavirus, leading to COVID-19, I got a little distracted. But life will in fact go on and I want to continue to do the challenge so I'll be catching up this week.
Luck. I must admit that most of the ancestors that I know anything about had their fair share of bad luck, but I'm going to talk about the tragedy my late mother-in-law, Edith Doerflinger, experienced that turned out to be good luck for her.
Edith's mother Margaret Kober died at the age of 37 of what we think was uterine cancer. She died in 1932, having had four children, the first, George, having died at 8 months. Edith was 7, her brother John must have been about 12, and her little sister Dorothy (Dotty) was about 6.
Her father Charles was left with three young children to raise. Though this was during the Great Depression, he was actually pretty prosperous, with a house, a car, and a telephone Edith told me. However, it was unheard of a man to raise children alone, even when he had enough money to support them, and thus one of the aunts or uncles who was married and childless offered to take the two girls. Charles refused this offer, claiming that he had promised his late wife that he would keep the children together. Accordingly, he remarried two years later and his second wife, Catherine, raised the children to adulthood.
Edith always referred to Catherine as her mother, called her mom, and clearly loved her. She was so completely integrated into the family as "Mom" that when Edith and her future husband went to get their marriage licence, her future husband was surprised to learn that Catherine wasn't her biological mother. This was apparently a rather embarrassing moment as the clerk asked for the name of the bride's mother and Edith answered Margaret while her fiance answered Catherine.
As to the lucky part of this: How many stepmothers end up being so beloved? Catherine was gone long before I joined the family but I only ever heard good things about her. Poor Margaret was a bit forgotten--and her personality was reportedly more difficult than Catherine's--but my impression was that she was sick for a fairly extended period of time before her death. It would have been difficult for her to make much of an impression on her surviving children. I hope that she would have been happy to know that her children still knew the love of a mother as they grew up. I know that the children felt lucky to have had this loving stepmother.
Catherine's family of origin was grafted on to the Kober family, leading to a genealogical nightmare. There were cousins who weren't really cousins and tons of spare aunts and uncles. I'm still untangling these people, whose existence I know of because of photographs labeled "Aunt so and so" or "Uncle something else" or "Cousin Hilda." Yikes.
Luck. I must admit that most of the ancestors that I know anything about had their fair share of bad luck, but I'm going to talk about the tragedy my late mother-in-law, Edith Doerflinger, experienced that turned out to be good luck for her.
Edith's mother Margaret Kober died at the age of 37 of what we think was uterine cancer. She died in 1932, having had four children, the first, George, having died at 8 months. Edith was 7, her brother John must have been about 12, and her little sister Dorothy (Dotty) was about 6.
Her father Charles was left with three young children to raise. Though this was during the Great Depression, he was actually pretty prosperous, with a house, a car, and a telephone Edith told me. However, it was unheard of a man to raise children alone, even when he had enough money to support them, and thus one of the aunts or uncles who was married and childless offered to take the two girls. Charles refused this offer, claiming that he had promised his late wife that he would keep the children together. Accordingly, he remarried two years later and his second wife, Catherine, raised the children to adulthood.
Edith always referred to Catherine as her mother, called her mom, and clearly loved her. She was so completely integrated into the family as "Mom" that when Edith and her future husband went to get their marriage licence, her future husband was surprised to learn that Catherine wasn't her biological mother. This was apparently a rather embarrassing moment as the clerk asked for the name of the bride's mother and Edith answered Margaret while her fiance answered Catherine.
As to the lucky part of this: How many stepmothers end up being so beloved? Catherine was gone long before I joined the family but I only ever heard good things about her. Poor Margaret was a bit forgotten--and her personality was reportedly more difficult than Catherine's--but my impression was that she was sick for a fairly extended period of time before her death. It would have been difficult for her to make much of an impression on her surviving children. I hope that she would have been happy to know that her children still knew the love of a mother as they grew up. I know that the children felt lucky to have had this loving stepmother.
Catherine's family of origin was grafted on to the Kober family, leading to a genealogical nightmare. There were cousins who weren't really cousins and tons of spare aunts and uncles. I'm still untangling these people, whose existence I know of because of photographs labeled "Aunt so and so" or "Uncle something else" or "Cousin Hilda." Yikes.
Margaret may have been a bit forgotten in some ways, but her influence plays a crucial role in the story. She was the one who exacted the promise to keep her children together, which enabled Edith and her siblings to be raised by Catherine. So Edith was lucky both in having Catherine for her mom, but also lucky in having Margaret as her first mother.
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