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Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Your Grandmother Memories

It's Saturday Night -

time for more Genealogy Fun!


Our assignment tonight from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing is to:

1.    He found an image on Facebook that said: “If you were blessed to know your Grandma…what was the one thing that you remember most about her?”

2.   Write a post in response to this comment.

Here’s mine:

I was fortunate to know both my grandmothers, Anna Sullivan Hork, who we called Nana, and Pansy Louise Lancaster Johnston, who we called Mam-ma. Nana was the fun grandmother and Mam-ma was not, though once we became adults, it was much better.

Nana
Nana raised four children; my dad was the youngest. She taught elementary, particularly the lowest grades, and also CCD classes at the catholic church. This shows she was used to being around young children. She liked to read to us and knew great songs, teaching them to us as we washed dishes. I still have old school readers she kept when withdrawn from Williams School, where she taught in Concord.

Nana always came to visit us in her black Volkswagen Beetle. It was an old one with an oval back window and us kids would argue on who could sit in the cubby in back. She always brought presents that she picked up at a 5 & 10 store such as Woolworths. We loved the gifts of jacks, coloring books, pick-up sticks, or paddle ball. Every Christmas, we got pajamas that we were able to open on Christmas Eve.

Nana was much older than Mam-ma, old enough to be her mother. Once she was unable to drive due to age, we didn’t see her as often, only when we drove to her house in San Mateo. Later she lived in a rest home and died in 1979 at the age of 85.

Mam-ma
Mam-ma had only one child, my mother. I don’t think she was used to being around children at all. When we stayed at her house, we had to be quiet, be careful to not slam the screen door, and to say “yes, ma’am” when we answered her. She also cooked strange food, as she grew up in Texas and liked food like black-eyed peas and okra. Though, when our grandfather caught catfish, she fried them up in cornmeal and that was pretty tasty. There weren’t much toys at her home either.

As we got older, she would take us out to lunch for our birthday and often bought us a pair of shoes for school. It was much easier to talk with her. I think she was also less strict after our grandfather, who we called Tom-Tom, died. They were both in their forties when I as the oldest was born and they were not ready to be grandparents, so made up these names instead of grandma and grandpa. Though my mother called her grandmother Mam-ma, too.

When Mam-ma got older, after our mother died, we took turns visiting her each week. We took her shopping or to doctor’s appointments, and she often took us out to lunch. She lived to 99 and it got more involved in visiting her each week. There were fewer trips shopping and more to the doctor. When I spent the day with her, she always asked about my genealogy research and I kept a notebook with me to jot down any of the memories she had. Now that more newspapers are online, she would have gotten a kick out of the news printed about her and her brothers.

Grandmothers Alike
There was one thing they had in common: a candy jar on the coffee table. Nana had sour balls. Mam-ma had butterscotch. They just had different approaches about the candy. I bet you can guess how that was.

Copyright © 2022 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.

Comments

  1. It's interesting that your grandmothers were as different in their ways as my grandmothers were. I guess it shouldn't be a surprise, though, since grandmothers are rarely related to each other!

    ReplyDelete

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