Mom did the milking, since Dad didn’t like working with the twelve cows. We sold the cream but not milk—we didn’t have the cooling required for milk. The man picked up the cream once a week. We had real butter at home, and real homemade bread in our school lunches—which we took with us to school every day if we wanted to eat—no cafeteria in one room schools!
At school we had a recess at 10:30 and 2:30, and a one-hour lunch break at noon. Reading was my favorite subject. I remember what an awful time I had with long division, though! I could do short division, but not long… We played anti-over, where we threw a ball over the school house, and “ducky on the rock.”
I was the seventh born of fifteen children. (The fifteenth one, William, had a bad heart and lived only a few days.) I was born at home, as we all were. When a new baby was about to be born, we would go outside to play, if we could, in the old corn crib if it was empty. There was no telephone, so Dad would go and bring the midwife. I remember once telling my teacher that when I grew up I wanted to have lots of children, like my mother did.
More died from flu than from bullets that year… That was the sad truth in America in 1918. World War I was raging, but so was an influenza epidemic like the world had never seen. Theodore Peterson—my great uncle Ted—was an engineering student at the University of Nebraska when duty called. He never made it to Europe.
I used to be church historian at the church where I grew up. One summer I decided to read all the board minutes, starting at the beginning—1858. Not far into the project, my eyes were drawn to the word “alcoholic”— and I knew I had a story.
My husband’s great-uncle Wayne Nedry Alwood (1893-1948) had a Model T automobile similar to this one, pictured. Those puppies could be hard to start, and sometimes a person had to get creative. But Wayne’s brother-in-law, Walter Garver, discovered a system that worked.
Mosey, my married name, is an unusual American surname, with no obvious ethnic origin. But I have learned that it’s English in origin—Yorkshire, to be specific. My husband’s great-grandfather Robert Mosey was one of his “gateway ancestors”—an ancestor who came from elsewhere to settle in America.
My ancestors ran the gamut from black sheep to outstanding citizen. But life isn’t fair… Those who honor faith and family, who play by the rules, sometimes suffer the most tragedy. Consider my Peterson ancestors.
A few years ago I found Lewis’ Civil War Pension Index Card and 1890 Special Veteran’s Census Schedule on ancestry.com. The census said that he had a “rifle wound in hip left” and was a “prisoner at Libby.” I was intrigued!
A few years ago I did an ancestry binder for an in-law branch of the family which shall remain nameless. I discovered the story of a genuine black sheep—George Washington Coomes, who was shot to death on September 5, 1896.