SPRINGFIELD REGISTER, Springfield, Illinois, 10 February 1958, obituary, Mrs. Cora Anderson, “Funeral services for Mrs. Cora Anderson, of 2425 S. 15th St., will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at the St. Paul’s Cathedral with Rev. David K. Montgomery officiating. Burial will be in Mayfield Cemetery, Carlinville. Mrs. Anderson died at the Homestead Nursing Home at 3:30 a.m. Monday. She was 85 years old. She was born April 3, 1872, in Hornsby, Ill., the daughter of Henry and Elizabeth Windsor. Her husband, Luther, preceeded her in death in 1945. She was a resident of Springfield for 12 years. Surviving are four daughters, Mrs. Louis Hey and Mrs. John Morse, both of city; Mrs. Leonard Griffel and Mrs. Fern Davis, both of Gillespie; four sons, Omer and Ross, of city; Earl, Litchfield; Carl, Dorchest; one sister, Mrs. Martha Meinecke, Tulsa, Okla.; 13 grandchildren and 16 great grandchildren.”

From Mrs. Helen Morse, born in 1913, now aged 86, and last surviving child of Cora and William Anderson; telephone conversations, 9 January, 11 April and 23 May 1999:

“My parents were of small stature, mother was 5’ 2 inches tall and father 5’ 7. Father was slim, he never ate much, and had dark blonde hair. Mother had long beautiful black hair to the middle of her back and wore her hair in a knot on her neck. In her old age she wanted to cut her hair short, her hair was gray by then, but my sister Thelma and I thought her hair so beautiful we talked her out of cutting it. Mother was always thin, but in middle age tended to be fat. In old age she again became thin. At any age she had a beautiful complexion.

My grandmother, Cora’s mother, died when my mother was a small child. Mother once told me that she would probably not have married so young if her own mother had lived longer. She married at age sixteen, father was twenty-one. Her family was poor so I guess there was some purpose to marrying so young.

After my parents married they first lived on a farm near Hornsby but actually closer to Gillespie, Illinois. After a few years there they moved to a rented farm near Walshville, Illinois. Later on they moved to Barnett, Illinois. About 1917 they bought their own farm with house in Gillespie, as both father and his father William Anderson ran a coal business in Gillespie, selling and delivering coal to the local area.

The house my parents bought in Gillespie was a big two-story victorian house with ten rooms, big enough for a large family. There was a living room, dining room and kitchen with a big table and chairs, also my parent’s bedroom downstairs, and upstairs three bedrooms for the children. Off the kitchen and dining room were large porches. We had no fireplaces in the house but got heat from an old wood burning stove in the dining room. There was a vent in the dining room ceiling so heat from the stove would go into one of the rooms upstairs. During winter cold mother would heat warming irons on the stove and carry them upstairs to warm the beds. The house had no running water except for the kitchen sink which had an old-fashioned water pump. For baths we boiled pans of water on the wood stove. On the farm we kept chickens cows horses geese ducks and raised our own food, you know the regular produce of beans and corn and so on. We slaughtered our own meat too, chickens geese ducks hogs. Beef we bought at the market as cows were too valuable for milk. Every few months Dad would kill a hog, or whenever we needed to, shot them in the head with a gun. My brothers all helped to run the farm and we all had our chores to do, mother would milk the cows and feed the stock and we small children would feed the fifty or so chickens and gather the eggs. I lucked out and did not have to do the hard farm work. And there was hard, tiring farm work to do. But instead of the farm work I had to cook a lot on our old wood stove for my brothers and parents. I was ten years old when I first started doing the family cooking. My parents lived in the old farmhouse at Gillespie for many years. After all the children were grown, they retired from farming and sold the house to my sister Gladys and her husband Louis Hey. My parents continued to live there though. Afterward my brother Ross and his family moved in with my parents, lived upstairs, ran the farm for Gladys and Louis. Eventually Ross decided to quit farming, so he moved to Dorchester, Illinois. My parents also moved to Dorchester with Ross. After everyone had moved Gladys and Louis sold the farm to Mr. Sam Walker. Before I was born there had been a fire in one of our houses. Mother used to mention it, said it destroyed almost everything, including the family Bible, old war medals, furniture and so on.

Mother was always very active in the house. She was a wonderful cook and could always make something out of nothing. Pies and cakes and fried chicken were some of the things she liked to make. She canned fruits too, especially berries, as we had the orchard on the farm. She also used to make a cottage cheese, she called it smear cheese, from sour cream. She’d use a separator to separate the cream from the milk and then let the cream sour, then she added something, I can’t remember what, to curdle the sour cream. We ate the cottage cheese with salt and pepper just like you do now. She also made our butter in one of those old-fashioned churns.

Mother made the family clothes too, boy’s shirts and girl’s dresses of nice colorful cloths from fabric stores. You ask me if mother ever made any quilts. No, she never sewed much of anything other than our clothes. With so many children, making our clothes took up all of her sewing time. You know, I can still see mother sitting by the old oil lamp, sewing on her old treadle Singer sewing machine, often until late in the night. We had no electricty in our house until I was eighteen years old (1930) and I often think that sewing by that dim light is what caused my mother’s blindness in later years. We used to do our shopping by going to town in a spring wagon. I can remember riding in the wagon. My parents did not buy a car, a Ford, until I was in high school (1928). When we were children mother would sing to us in German. For example, german lullabies when she put us to bed. Or to amuse us german versions of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “Little Church of the Vale.” I think she learned these songs from her parents who I believe were both german.

My parents were not very religious. Mother’s father had been very religious with Bible reading at night and grace before supper, but my parents were not very religious. My parents had sixteen (fifteen) children and raised eleven so they were always busy and did not have much time to go to church. Not until years later when my mother lived with my husband and I, did she join a church, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Springfield. My parents were good to us. Mother was jolly and even-tempered, father the stronger discplinary temper of the house, I guess people were more like that in those days. I only remember getting punished once by my father when my sister Thelma and I were fighting over something. We fought a lot as children do. Father took some switches and spanked us. It didn’t hurt, but as a child I had a lot of sore back pains and when father started hitting me on the back Thelma grabbed the switches and held them protecting my back from getting hit…. dear Thelma. Earl, Tully and Clifford my older brothers served in World War I. Of the three only Clifford was sent overseas, Earl and Tully were stationed in America. Clifford was in the artillery in France and was killed by poison gas the very last day of the war, Armistice Day (11 November 1919). I remember when mother got the telegram from the war department saying Clifford was dead, mother just screamed, I can still see it. Oh that was a terrible terrible day. My mother was blind. She started going blind when she was about fifty years old (1922). She had glaucoma and there was nothing in those days that could be done about it. But even though she was almost blind she still led an active life. For example, mother and father did things, like playing cards. She could hardly see the cards but she would win, and that would make father all upset. Also because of her blindness mother was unable to read, instead she liked to listen to the soap operas on the radio. In later years though she did not listen so much to the radio as before, but by then she was very old. Father died during one of our yearly family reunions. We had a family picnic in the park at Litchfield, my brother Earl lived in Litchfield then, and during the picnic father had a sudden heart attack and had to be rushed to the hospital… and there he died. Well, at the very least I can say that he died happy, as being with family was what he enjoyed more than anything else. During World War II mother went completely blind, so after father passed away in 1945 we put her in a nursing home near my sister Gladys’ house. We often visited her there. A while after that mother moved in with Gladys and lived with her for some time. During the last two years of her life (1956-58) mother came to live with my husband and I. At our house mother had her own room. She also had a rocking chair in the room where she liked to sit and listen to religious songs and church services on her radio; she would hum and sing along with the songs. Her room also had a half-grandfather clock that chimed the hours so she could know what time it was. Most any morning mother would be up before anybody else, she usually went to bed about 9 p.m., and first thing after waking she’d reach from bed grasping for her rocking chair, always kept near her bed. Then she would get into the rocking chair and wait for me to come with coffee and to put a robe on her. Later in the morning, after I had sent my husband off to work and the children to school, I would bring her into the kitchen and fix her breakfast. For the rest of the day mother would sit in some room of the house. Since she was blind there really was not much else she could do. On nice weather days I usually took her out for walks around the neighborhood. She walked with a cane and sometimes wore dark glasses to hide her eyes. She also liked to go for rides in the car. On Sunday, Gladys and her husband usually came over for dinner. Mother loved their visits, actually she loved any visit, and those family visits do make for a happy memory.

Last, my mother loved animals, loved it when our pet dogs would lick her hands. My mother lived to be eighty-six (eighty-five) and died of pneumonia at the hospital.”