Grandma Ruthcox probably around 1910
This is my mother, Ruth Inez Wilcox. She passed away the day before my birthday (20 June) in 2007. She was born 6 August 1905 which made her fall short of 102 years old by a little more than a month. I met a lot of people in my life but her and my uncle Walter were the most heavily laden with common sense that I can recall.
I'm not exactly certain where this will end because we have a large family and some of those in Kansas still live close to their roots. I do know where it began. A couple years ago my sister (Carol Wilcox Adolph) sent me almost forty pages of handwritten notes that mom had passed on to her. In Mom's words, “What I have written is all from memory so if I have made mistakes there is no one around old enough to know that I did. Just memories.”
Those include memories of small town Kansas that most of us who are living do not know. There are customs and practices that we may find foreign. Since Mom loved to tell stories, I suspect that my sister and I heard them when we were small (starting 68 and 70 years ago).
The problem is that we are a minority in a mostly young family, extended and otherwise. Carol had four sons and they had children. My wife and her wonderful family adopted my son and I. There are over 25 grandchildren and great grandchildren involved there with the standard number of accompanying adults. She became Grandma Ruthcox when Alex and Taylor named her that but the world she inhabited was strange to us. My sister and I have two cousins who are older than I. They might like to have some input and we have an older cousin in Paola from Dad's side of the family. A younger cousin still lives very close to where I was born. In fact, I think it may be the house where she was born. I am woefully short on Dad's ancestry compared to Mom's.
As we start, the words will be Mom's and I will try to use modern technology (google images for example) to make them meaningful to todays world. Let's see where we go.
I'm not exactly certain where this will end because we have a large family and some of those in Kansas still live close to their roots. I do know where it began. A couple years ago my sister (Carol Wilcox Adolph) sent me almost forty pages of handwritten notes that mom had passed on to her. In Mom's words, “What I have written is all from memory so if I have made mistakes there is no one around old enough to know that I did. Just memories.”
Those include memories of small town Kansas that most of us who are living do not know. There are customs and practices that we may find foreign. Since Mom loved to tell stories, I suspect that my sister and I heard them when we were small (starting 68 and 70 years ago).
The problem is that we are a minority in a mostly young family, extended and otherwise. Carol had four sons and they had children. My wife and her wonderful family adopted my son and I. There are over 25 grandchildren and great grandchildren involved there with the standard number of accompanying adults. She became Grandma Ruthcox when Alex and Taylor named her that but the world she inhabited was strange to us. My sister and I have two cousins who are older than I. They might like to have some input and we have an older cousin in Paola from Dad's side of the family. A younger cousin still lives very close to where I was born. In fact, I think it may be the house where she was born. I am woefully short on Dad's ancestry compared to Mom's.
As we start, the words will be Mom's and I will try to use modern technology (google images for example) to make them meaningful to todays world. Let's see where we go.
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