Week 47: Good Deeds and Week 48: Gratitude

 I am playing catchup here and these two themes seem to work together well.  I am going to shift my focus for the moment to my husband's side of the family:  after all, our children might actually look at this someday and wonder why I never mention their family name!  

This will come under the "hearsay" category of research.  In other words, I have no way to confirm this story as it was told to me, but it seems likely and I did see the outcome many years later!  I did talk about these folks a little in week 11 but there are a few more details.

My late mother-in-law was the middle child of three surviving children (her older brother George had died as an infant in 1919).  lived in Brooklyn, as anyone who ever heard Edith speak could attest.  When their mother died of cancer in 1932, their father Charles Kober was left with three young children to raise--Edith was 7, her little sister Dotty was 6, and their big brother John was about 12.   The story goes that his mother maybe or an aunt? would visit the cemetery weekly as was the custom and there she met the mother of Catherine, a woman in her 30s who had never married.  Charles needed a mother for his children, Catherine needed a husband, and there you had it, a marriage arranged in a cemetery!  Catherine was by Edith's account a wonderful mother, Edith and her brother and sister always called her Mom, she was kind and good with dogs, and the marriage was a happy one.  Edith always expressed gratitude when she talked about her mom who did the very good deed of taking on the raising of these three children.