they would turn in their graves

Margaret Darlene Hindsley https://www.dalewoodwardfuneralhomes.com/obituaries/Margaret-Darlene-Hindsley?obId=23703736   https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/family-of-murdered-florida-grandmother-remember-her-as-happiest-and-kindest-person   https://www.wesh.com/article/couple-shoots-kills-elderly-woman-ponce-inlet/38698935   https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2024/05/02/caregiver-to-be-sentenced-in-ponce-inlet-shooting-death-of-89-year-old/   Margaret Darlene (Burnside) Hindsley was my French teacher in high school between 1987 and 1991. I studied French all four years in high school (including a two weeks’ spring break trip to France in 1990), continued the study in all four years of college (and one summer study abroad program at Université Laval in Québec, and taught French four of my five years of teaching. I took two groups of my students to Québec in 1998 and 2000, have visited Québec with my own children and have traveled in France with my husband twice, in...

Edith (Dellinger) Hartzell Hollopeter Back in April I wrote about Sylvia Elizabeth (Freeman) Hollopeter, my great-grandmother. Because Sylvia died in 1943, seven years before my dad was born, he never knew her and, in his childhood, he thought of Edith, Bert’s second wife, as his grandma. Both widowed in the 1940s, Albert E. and Edith were married in 1951 in Ohio. I have no idea how they met, and I have a query in to my dad to ask, but I suspect they met in Florida. After Albert and Sylvia’s son Frank was killed in the Philippines during World War II, as compensation Albert was offered a small parcel of land in Dunedin, Florida, where he then spent twenty-three winters. Albert was living in Florida when the census was taken in 1950, about a year before he married Edith.   Edith G. Dellinger was born in 1885 in Ohio. In 1900, she was living with her parents, farmers in York Township, Sandusky County, Ohio, and her three siblings, Charles, Earl and Elva. At the age of twenty in 1905,...

Calvin & Betty Coffman, ca. 1970 Today is Flag Day. We attended a No Kings protest event in Grand Rapids this morning, and the organizers (Indivisible Greater Grand Rapids) righteously saw fit to turn the American flag upside down – a “traditional signal of distress or extreme danger”.   I grew up next door to a veteran of the First World War and his wife. Calvin Coffman was born in 1893. He was only twenty-three years old when he enlisted on 25 January 1917. He served with Company H of the 148 th  Infantry his entire time in the Army. He was at Meuse-Argonne, Ypres-Lys, and then part of the Defensive Sector. From 23 June 1918 until 28 March 1919, he was with the American Expeditionary Forces. He was honorably discharged on 21 April 1919. When I knew him in the 1970s and 1980s, he was more than half a century removed from his time in the service. He  still  had trench foot and visited his podiatrist once a week. He had some unknown (but large) number of buckets o...

Margie Peckham, 1951 I met my mother-in-law Margie when I was only eighteen years old, when she and my at-the-time boyfriend’s dad Ed came to campus to visit and took us out to dinner. I didn’t know then that she would be my mother-in-law and grandmother to my children, but she already had three daughters-in-law and ten grandchildren at the time. She was the quintessential grandma type – white hair, bright clothing, always had earrings and shoes to match each outfit, and it was easy to get her talking about anything. Seventeen years older than my mom, she was old enough to be my grandma, too – and in fact, my husband still recounts all the years his friends and classmates would say “Jimmy, your grandma’s here!” when it was really his mom. A few months later when we were moving out of the dorm to head to our separate parents’ homes for the summer, Ed, Margie, my mom, Jim and I went out to lunch (Angelo’s, another icon of my life that has passed from this earth) before heading out of tow...

  Cora Annis "Anna" (Byers) Glander with her daughter Nedra Ruth, 1918 Again, I am a day late – and my husband and I have experienced a change in status this weekend. We are now empty nesters. Our son flew the coop in 2020 with his first apartment and has now had his own house since 2022. Our daughter has now moved to her first apartment as well – we were assisting with the move and helping her to get settled into her new place this weekend.   On the wall in my foyer is a small oval photograph of my grandmother as a baby with her mother, my great-grandmother, Cora Annis “Anna” (Byers) Glander. Grandma wasn’t her first baby, as the prior year she had given birth to a boy who lived only thirteen hours. When my grandma was born, Anna was twenty-seven years old, the same age I was when I had my first child. Anna’s birthday was the same as my mom’s birthday; she died at the age of only sixty years just two months before my mom was born. Her death certificate is not part of the oth...