Uncle Eddie

[Wilma]

Everybody has a non-relative relative that belongs to the family.  Mine was Uncle Eddie.  He was married to my father's older sister, like 15 years older.  They were married in 1909 when my father was about 7 years old.  They had 3 children.  My aunt died when their youngest child was 2 years old.

My aunt was a bonnie Irish lass.  At least the picture I have of her looks to be and there is quite of bit of Irish in our background.  She had a teacher's certificate, even though she never used it.  Instead she moved to South Central Kansas with her family and went to work as a hired girl for a farm family.  She married the son, an only child, and produced 3 children.  Sometime after the last one was born she contracted tuberculosis and died in 1916.

Now you would think that a young man with 3 small children would be looking for someone to help him raise those children.  Uncle Eddie didn't.  He had the help of his parents and my aunt's parents.  He and the children lived with his parents.

The youngest child was about 16 when I was born.  My grandparents had moved to Missouri by that time to live with their oldest son.  This is where a parting of ways would normally occur.  Uncle Eddie's in-laws would normally have drifted away from the family where their sister no longer lived.  This didn't happen.  My father and his older brothers still felt connected to Uncle Eddie.  We spent many a Sunday at Uncle Eddie's place, my mother helping his mother with the Sunday meal.  Actually, we called Uncle Eddie's mother, Grandma.  It was years before I realized that she was no relation to us.  I thought of her as the paternal grandmother that I never had a chance to know.

Uncle Eddie was one the the finest people that I have ever known.  He gave up farming and moved to town about the same time as my parents moved to Elk County.  This still didn't sever the connection.  My father's oldest brother came to visit quite often and he would always bring Uncle Eddie with him.  And so it was that my children got to know Uncle Eddie.  He was like another uncle to them, too.  Even when he couldn't get around without the help of 2 crutches, he remained a favorite of mine and of everyone else in the family.

When his wife, my aunt, died in 1916, Uncle Eddie chose a quiet little country cemetery for her final resting place.  He later buried both his parents there and there is where his children placed him.  Later, when my father knew he wasn't going to beat the cancer that he had, he chose this little cemetery, too.  An so it has become a family cemetery, with my parents and Uncle Eddie's family, his daughter and her husband and a granddaughter's husband.  The granddaughter visits the cemetery quite frequently and reports to me that all is well there.

Do you have an Uncle Eddie?