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WHAT ABOUT YOUR GRANDPARENTS?
By
Ada Brownell
NOTE:
I will have a special promotion celebrating the release of The Lady Fugitive Sept. 25-28. Watch to see what I’m giving away
free!
Could
the unusual things your ancestors did make a good historical romance?
My grandmother, Minnie, was an
elocutionist who performed her original poems and songs on stage in Colorado
when she was a teenager. Among those was a humorous poem based on the nursery
rhyme, “Old Mother Hubbard,” and with a little smile, Grandma recited
it until she was in her 90s.
Grandma wrote poetry and her song, “Rocky Mountain Columbine,” was in the
running for the Colorado state song. She loved to play the piano and sing the
tune until she died in her early 90s..
She wasn’t a redhead like my mother,
but she had spunk. From what I’ve been told by different relatives, she was
orphaned at a young age and traded among relatives. She ended up with an uncle
in Pueblo, Colo.
In
Pueblo, she graduated from Centennial High School and received a teaching
certificate. Called High School of District One in the beginning, the school was
an adobe building renamed Centennial three years later in 1876. It was one
hundred years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the year
Colorado was admitted to the union. Colorado was dubbed “The Centennial State,”
and that’s how the school became Centennial.
Some relatives said and other denied, that among all
Grandma’s successes trouble brewed. From what I’ve heard, the uncle was
abusive. (I’m the youngest in the family and not all the stories among us
jibed.)
Whatever the reason, Minnie packed a
suitcase and took off walking.
Perhaps she caught a ride on a wagon,
but she ended up about 35 miles down the road near Florence, Colo. She got a
job teaching in a one-room adobe school.
In that area is where she met William
Shepherd, my grandfather.
He died before I was born, but I’ve
always been fascinated that he traveled around in his youth showing one of the
first Passion-of-the-Christ moving picture shows. My brother has the reel.
As with William in The Lady Fugitive, Grandpa’s father was murdered.
After they were married, Grandma and
Grandpa moved to Iowa, where their farming and ranching prospered. When my
mother, Rita, went to college in about 1917, she said money wasn’t a problem.
Then Grandpa invested in sheep, and
during the Great Depression of 1920, often called , “the forgotten depression,” they lost
everything. They homesteaded near Walsenburg, Colo., and then Grandpa became
the sheriff in Alamo, a nearby mining community. He died of pneumonia after
making his rounds in the small mining town.
Grandma took the money they’d saved,
invested in two large houses in Pueblo, divided them into apartments, and
supported herself. She never married again.
I wish I had been there to find out how
my grandparents met and more details, but I wasn’t. So The Lady Fugitive is the story of Jenny Louise Parks and William
O’Casey. They have some experiences similar to my grandparents, such as Jenny,
an orphan like Grandma, running away from an abusive uncle. Yet in my story,
she has a price on her head. But Jenny and William and the events in The Lady Fugitive are fiction. Any
resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, and it’s
probably a good thing.
One reviewer said, “Jenny will have you
laughing, biting your nails, wishing you had a gun to help.”
What
else can you expect from a fugitive?
Ada Brownell’s Amazon Author page, including The Lady Fugitive. http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KJ2C06
Ada’s blog: http://www.inkfromanearthenvessel.blogspot.com
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