Life on Her Own

After Andrew died, Anna was faced raising two children on her own. She did not like taking help from others. She worked cleaning people's houses and would take Kathryn with her. My mom (Kathryn) would tell me growing up that this impacted her greatly. She swore that she would do all in her power not to clean other people's houses and not to have people come into her house to judge how she was doing, like those people did to her mom.

Andrew was in school at this time and was the man of the house. Anna suffered from migraine headaches that at times would incapacitate her. One story I remember hearing, was that one of the times that Anna had a migraine, Andrew had arrived home and found his mom on the floor. He was scared and jumped on his bicycle to fetch the doctor. Anna would continue to battle migraines throughout her life.

Anna and Helen

Anna and Helen were close sisters. They were close in age and after they both married both families,  did a lot together. In their late teens early 20's, Anna and Helen would go out in the family car. Helen would drive and quite often they would run out of gas. Back in those days there was no fuel gauge so you had to use a stick or other means to know when you might run out of gas. Helen and Anna were not very good about this part of driving.