Grandma Moses/ My Life's History ed. Otto Kallir

Grandma Moses was the second of ten children.  She didn't know her name until she was six--as everyone called her Sissy.  Her name, she discovered, was Anna Maria Robertson, born in 1860 on a farm in New York.

She loved her siblings and parents, paper dolls, the fair, church services, and having visitors.  Mostly she loves her brother Arthur, her best friend until he died at 21.  

She writes: 

I lost two brothers and one sister in six years, the funerals were two years apart.

We had to take the bitter with the sweet always.  Those children could have been saved nowadays [One died of complications of measles.]. The doctor could not have done any good at that time.  Mother was very matter of fact, and she said, "As you are born you must die," and Father took it in that way too. 

Her first fair was a three-day event and they went there by train, her first train ride. She loved the flower exhibit, the noisy music hall, the animals and the stove building.  The latter was filled with all kinds of cast iron stoves and the sellers handed out "the best" food she'd ever had, all cooked on those stoves. 

As for education, girls had little of it.  They were needed at home to milk cows, shuck corn, churn butter, rock the cradles of younger siblings, and wash mounds of clothes in wooden tubs outside.  They also had to help in the making of soap--not to mention weaving and spinning cloth! "In my mother's day, if a woman could write her own name, that was all that was necessary." They also had to make all their clothes--by hand. 

In families or ten to twelve children, who had time to go to school? 

"Going to church on Sunday, this was a pleasure in olden times. The man of the house would rise early, feed the stock, milk the cows, curry off the horses; yoke up the oxen, if in winter, to the long sleigh, placing thereon a bundle or two of straw, while the wife or mother prepared a hearty breakfast , and put up a good lunch, and helping to dress all the young and the old in their best, banking up the fire in the fire place for a warm room on their return from church...."

And you thought getting off to church (or any other event) was hard?

She writes about learning to sew without a machine and the drudgery of making her own first dress. (Since then I've made many a dress, and when I was 88 years old, I made myself a velvet dress, and that had to be sewed by hand.) 

One thing nobody had to bother with was brushing their teeth.  They'd never heard of such a thing.  And yet her brother Lester "never had a toothache and never had a tooth pulled.  When he was in his eighties, he could crack a hickory nut in his teeth as fast as he could eat them"