I love the name OMA. I grew up with my neighbors who were German. As a child I loved to say the word. My dad's mother was the only grandparent I had and she didn't want to be called grandma so my oldest cousin named her. She heard her mom call her Laura and her dad call her mom and my cousin put the names together and that is what we all called her. She would come to our house every week on the bus from a lunch date she had with a lady friend in downtown Cincinnati. Laura mom never drove so she would ride the bus to our house. We would watch out the window till we saw her coming up the street. She would have dinner at our house and then my mom would drive her home. She lived with my aunt. My mom's parents both passed away before any grand children were born. My mom had 7 siblings. But we got to know our great grandmother who was German and a feisty wonderful grandmother. I loved to visit her. My mom loved her too. As she raised all her siblings and her cousins. What a woman.

Thanks for sharing your stories, Moni. I enjoyed reading them.

Mary

I enjoy these memories. Thank you.

My mother was sole support of her father and mother during the Great Depression. Her father had had a stroke, and her mother was caretaker until his death in the late 1930's. When my parents divorced, Grandma came to live with us so that my mother could earn a living. My experience of her was of a gloomy, mostly silent, suspicious old woman. She lived to be ninety, despite frequently asking, "Why doesn't God take me?"

Only when I did some genealogy did I understand her better. She was 16 when she and an older sister and brother immigrated to NYC from Ireland with their widowed mother -- long before Ellis Island. Her father was been Scots. Her mother was Irish, yet she never mentioned the Irish connection, reviled as it was in the US when the family arrived. She worked as a laundress until she married a Scots-American veteran of the Spanish-American War. They lost one child before having my mother. By the time my mother was five, Grandma had lost her sister, brother and mother to TB. Then her husband became ill, and my mother's marriage ended in divorce. Enough to make you tired of life?

My father left my mother and me for his secretary when I was too young to remember him living with us. His parents had little contact with us after the divorce was final when I was six. My father had visitation, and would sometimes take me to see his family when they were living nearby. He took me to Arizona to see them when I was about five. We then drove to Denver with his parents and his youngest sister. My only memories of his mother are from that trip and from another weekend visit to NY one summer when I was about ten.

Again, only genealogy research -- and finding an aunt shortly before her death -- could 'flesh out' this grandmother. She was the daughter of a successful doctor who had left his native Pennsylvania to set up practice in Colorado. She was their only daughter to live past three. At about twenty, she had a prosperous farmer suitor in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania, but was persuaded by her parents to marry a man in Colorado -- to continue to be near them. My grandfather never earned a proper living, and the family (seven children) moved frequently. One son died at age seven.

During the Depression, my grandfather left home for another woman. My grandmother rented a large house near the University of Missouri and took in college student boarders. A relative near Cincinnati took in the two eldest boys, and the other four lived one room with their mother. My grandmother held it all together...and after a year her husband returned. (If you don't notice a 'pattern' yet, let me tell you about Grandfather's grandfather.)

Her father had been thrown from his buggy returning from a night call in the mountains and had broken his hip. His practice ended, and he took a job as a ship's doctor out of Galveston until he had to retire. Both of her brothers died as young adults, unmarried, childless. Her parents came to live with her until their deaths.

My grandmother died in her seventies, in California. Grandfather lived to 100.

I'm enjoying reading these stories. People--most of them, anyway--are endlessly interesting.

My other grandmother died before I was born, but my father's cousin Peggy was a special person in my life. Probably around 50 when I was born, she was old enough to qualify as a grandmother.

Peggy lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and my family lived in Queens. But we visited her a couple of times a year, and always during Easter vacation. My parents would occasionally drop me off at her house and go on a short trip of their own. I loved it. I loved Peggy, and I loved her wonderful Victorian (?) farmhouse and the lovely countryside.

Peggy's husband, a Frenchman, wasn't enthusiastic about work, and so she took in boarders to make ends meet. "Nothing but the best for my guests," she would say when my dad questioned why she was serving her boarders loin lamb chops. We weren't crazy about her husband, but she loved him.

After my mother died I spent a lot of time with Peggy. Her house had no TV and no air conditioning, but she had a wonderful collie-shepherd named Smokey, lots of books, and some fascinating spiders outside the tall windows. She also had a huge rug frame in her dining room. I sat and watched her hook beautiful rugs out of old woolen skirts and jackets, and many years later, when I inherited her hooking equipment and bags of woolens, I taught myself to do the same.

Here's a picture of Peggy's house. I often wonder if it's still there.

If you know the address, or at least the street name, try Google Maps Street View or Google Earth.

Unfortunately, I don't know the street name. I remember riding my bike in one direction to go to a lake, and Peggy driving in another direction to go to another lake, so perhaps I can figure it out, more or less. I also have a friend now living about 15 miles away, so perhaps she wouldn't mind a short road trip one of these days.

Moni, I have enjoyed reading your posts as well as the following threads! Thank you all for sharing.

My mother's father also left my grandmother during the depression. My grandmother raised my mother and her sister alone with the help of her brother, my great Uncle. She never remarried and he never married so they lived together until they both passed. My grandmother was an amazing woman though, she was strong, never complained and had a wonderful sense of humor. She lived in NY city and would come to visit us in SoCal every other year. Amazing but she never aged and always looked the same to me. At home, she was devoted to bringing meals to the seniors in her neighbourhood and continued to do so even after she lost her leg and then the 2nd leg a few years later. She never saw herself as an invalid or ill, people needed her help and that was all there was to it. We lost her when I was 14. We used to write to her all the time and I still have a letter she had written back to correct my spelling.

My mother reconnected with her father when she was 22 and living in California. He left to go into vaudeville with his brother but failed miserably at it. Mom forgave him and let him come to see us kids every few months but my father who adored both my mother and Grandmother despised him. It was a strained situation and I always thought of him as strange. He died all alone in his apartment in Los Angeles when he was in his 80's.

My father's mother died when my dad was 10, he was the youngest of 11 kids and we know very little about her but have pictures and we (my sisters and I) look a lot like her. My dad's father was a hard man stubborn Irish Immigrant, and we have the records of his arrival at Ellis Island in the early 1900's. He died inside when my grandmother passed, started drinking heavy and kept to himself. He disowned my father when he was 17 and joined the navy. They didn't have much of a relationship after that and we never had the opportunity to meet him. One of my dad's brothers however went to Ireland several times to build our family tree and he made a website for it. It's wonderful to look through. It has ton's of family history with pictures of my everyone including my great grandfather and the house that he and my grandfather were raised in (shown below) Amazing. My uncle has since passed so it is even more of a treasure now

My great great grandfather in front of the house, the story it that he trimmed the tree in the back ground and took great pride in how it turned out.

Lukkiirish, I bet you were grateful to your uncle for putting together the family tree and setting up a website. A treasure indeed.

Interesting that you and your sisters look like your father's mother. Females are likely to have some genes in common with their fathers' mother. Men have but one female chromosome, which they received from their mothers, and they pass it on to their daughters. It might show up in ways other than physical appearance, but the genes are there somewhere.

Thanks Alisande, yes, it's a treasure and I just love sifting through it especially because we never had the opportunity to know them in person. I worry one day it'll disappear from the internet so for Christmas I plan on creating a book from the pages on the site and having a copy printed for each member of our family as well as my cousin (who helped his dad do the research).

I didn't know that about the genes, but it's really interesting. There are five of us girls and one who was blessed with my mothers thin figure looks identical to picture of my paternal grandmother when she was about 18. The resemblance is really uncanny.