FAMILY TREE
Tracing Great-Grandma Flora
My grandmother, Christina, didn’t talk much about her childhood. Her father died when she was a child, and her mother, Flora, married Percy Curry, whom Christina called Pop. The marriage didn’t last: Flora abandoned Christina and her siblings, and married and moved several times, making Flora difficult to trace through the census.
But I found Christina and her brother Roscoe in the 1920 census. They lived with Pop and his new wife, Annie, in LaMotte, Illinois. I fell in love with this man who took these children into his home when Flora skipped out. I found two newspaper articles from 1928. The first said that Pop was shot by an estranged husband in April of that year; the second, from May, reported that the man who shot Pop was acquitted. This explained my grandmother’s silence on her past: Her biological father died when she was 4, then her mother abandoned her. Later, the man she considered to be a father was killed.
Grandma Christina’s story gets better. The 1930 census lists her in Bedford, Indiana, with her half-sister Laura, who is married with a son. Not long after, Christina met Frank Staten, and they married in 1932. My father was born a few years later.
I also found Flora. She married her fifth husband in 1929.
She died that year, age 52, and is buried in Terre Haute, Indiana. At the top of her small headstone is the word MOTHER.