Mam-ma's Southern Family

I thought this week I would show photos of my grandparents celebrating Christmas. This might have been set up as a Christmas card but I'm not sure. Mam-ma is on the left and Tom-Tom on the right, with Thunder in the center. They had a very small tree. And look at that crazy pattern on their drapes. Clearly this is the 50s. My grandparents always came to our house for Christmas and Thanksgiving because it was easier since we had the large family of six kids. My mother did most of the cooking but Mam-ma brought some dishes to share. Tom-Tom's sister, Beryl, always brought pies: pumpkin, pecan, and mincemeat. My dad and I loved the mincemeat. Here is one from 1975 with my whole family and Tom's sister, Beryl is seated on the left. We had lost Tom-Tom two years previously. Merry Christmas! Copyright © 2021 by Lisa S. Gorrell, Mam-ma's Southern Family, All rights reserved.

My grandmother, Pansy Louise Lancaster Johnston, the one we all called Mam-ma, was very crafty. She was a very talented seamstress and made many of her own clothes. She even worked for clothing stores taking in alterations. Here is an example of a dress she made. Here is another, showing my mother, Lela and her with matching dresses. Later in life, when she stopped sewing, she would crochet and made many blankets. You can see an example on the chair to the right of Mam-ma. When she moved to the assisted living place, she liked to sit and embroider. She bought T-shirts and embroidered flowers, crosses, and other symbols on them in a decorative way. It sure kept her busy and she enjoyed giving the shirts to people she cared about. Here is an example of one she made for herself. I think as she got older and it was easier wearing sweat clothes, she wanted to decorate them up. This is my fourth year working on this year-long prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. I will write each week...

My grandmother, Pansy Louise Lancaster, whom we called Mam-ma, lived to about two months shy of her one hundredth birthday. We had great plans to celebrate that milestone, but her health began to fail and she passed away on 8 October 2013. However, we did have a nice 99th birthday celebration at her assisted living home, Courtyards at Pine Creek in Concord, California the day before her actual birthday. All of the family came to celebrate. She was so happy to have all of her six grandchildren, three of her great-grandchildren, and all of the three great-great-grandchildren present for the party. Even her nephew came to help with the celebration. The cake was beautifully decorated with candles but I don’t remember if she was able to blow them out on her own. My sister, Sabrina, took great care with the arrangements and we all had a great time visiting with our grandmother and each other. We got to see Zoe and Noah, the two youngest for the first time. Today, November 19 is her birth...

In the nearly one hundred years that my grandmother, Pansy Louise (Lancaster) Johnston, lived, she experienced great technological change. Born in 1913 and died just two months short of her hundredth birthday in 2013, many technical advances happened in her lifetime. Growing up on a farm in Erath County, Texas, transportation was likely horse and wagon into town, and walking on her own two feet to school. Later, they lived in the town of Stephenville and her father was a self-taught auto mechanic. In her lifetime, planes progressed to jets, and her brother, R.D., was an Air Force pilot in World War II and Korea. Her husband, Tom, and her younger brother, Wayne, served in the Navy. Pansy was independent and drove a car up until the last decade of her life, when a minor heart attack put a stop to her driving. Their family did not have a radio in 1930, but it was likely they soon had one. Once television was widely available, the Johnston family had one, as I have heard stories ...

Sometimes I take these themes literally. I searched in RootsMagic genealogy database for the word “steps” and found this article about my first cousin, twice removed, Lovetta Loveless. Her father, Zachariah Loveless was a son of my maternal great-great-grandfather, Ebenezer Loveless. Lovetta (1929-2011), never married. She lived in Little Rock, Arkansas and worked as a legal secretary. A January 6, 1977 newspaper article from the Arkansas Democrat gave an account of her trip to a Club Med location in Playa Blanca, Mexico.       “It was a fabulous vacation for Lovetta Loveless when she spent a December week at Club Mediterranie at Playa Blanca, Mexico. The village is situated on a hillside on the Pacific Coast between Puerto Vallarta and Manzanilla. ‘My bungalow was next to the top--86 steps from the main area. Even though I tried to eliminate trips up and down, it was almost necessary to make four or five trips a day,’ she said.      ...

My mother lived with her parents in the 1940s and 1950s in Walnut Creek, California until she was a junior in high school, and then they moved to a house they purchased in Pleasant Hill. Both communities were rural or small-town in nature. There were local shops to purchase goods but no large department stores. Perhaps Sears or JC Penney had catalog stores where one could order something.  So if you wanted to do shopping in larger department stores, you had to drive or ride the bus into Oakland or San Francisco. Oakland had an H.C. Capwell and a Sears Roebuck store, plus many other fine shops along Broadway and Telegraph. It is likely that my mother and her mother traveled into Oakland on the Greyhound bus and shopped in the stores. It would have been a big deal, one where you put on your best clothes because you were going into the city. How do I know this? We have in our collection a photograph of my mother and grandmother walking down Broadway near the Paramount Theater. From th...

I currently have four people in my genealogy database named Hazel Loveless. Three are men, all born before 1820, and one is a woman, born in 1914. I wonder about the popularity of the name in the 1700s. I decided to search the 1800 U.S. census on just the first name of Hazel. I got sixteen hits, with half having spelling variations. My ancestor’s brother, Hazel Loveless, b. about 1770, turned up in Newberry District, South Carolina.  Others were found in New York, Vermont, Maryland, Connecticut, North Carolina, and New Hampshire. I thought it was a southern thing to name boys Hazel. Census Year No. with Hazel as First Name 1810 26 1820 33 1830 66* [1] 1840 84* My Hazels Hazel Loveless was born about 1770. He was an older brother of my maternal 4x-great-grandfather, James Loveless, who was born about 1771. Both may have been born in North Carolina or South Carolina, b...