Lois Grant Mora

Lois was my grandmother's aunt.

Technically, she was born Hannah Lois Grant but hated her birth name. My grandmother, was given her middle name in her honor, Lois.

Lois was born on June 12, 1890 in Troy, NY. She was the eldest of three.

In 1913 she married George Mora. They never had any children and she died on September 3, 1958 in Lake, Ohio. She was interred at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland.

Isabel

Isn't it funny how with some we recall the end of their lives but not the life - or how they lived for that matter.

Shortly after my Uncle Dave died, my Aunt Robin mentioned my father had a 5 year diary my late grandmother kept. I asked him to to read it and he sent it out.

She began authoring it around 1934, her junior year of high school. It was a line a day. The diary chronicled things like camping, dates, graduating high school, her mother's death, and graduating college. Her mother's death was quite interesting to me. Her mother, Isabel, wasn't a woman I knew much about except she had been ill.

Isabel, Dorothy, and Robert Leisenheimer. Passport photo, note her signature at the bottom.

In early January 1938 my grandmother writes that her mother is going to have an operation to remove a tumor from her brain.  A few days go by and she writes that "mother is now at DeVand's funeral home" and later she counted the exact amount of flowers at the funeral home. I'm not sure if she was really that detached, the diary was limited, or maybe it was a combination of things.

Isabel's Obituary.

But yes. Sadly Grandma Isabel died on the operating table at age 46 or 48 (depending on the source).

The Welsh Connection

I do have Welsh ancestry on various sides of my family but the one of the clearest connections is the Jones/Lewis one.

My 3rd great-grandmother (paternal) was Hannah Lewis (married name Jones) born 13 May 1841 in Llangynllo Wales.  Not much is known about her early life before she came to the US with her husband John.

From John's estate records Hannah did not read or write. She and John settled in Alliance, Ohio and had 10 children, the second of which (Sarah) was my 2nd great-grandmother.

I hope to go into John's estate further later this year but what is clear is that it dragged on for a very long time. The family farm was run into the ground and Sarah's husband (known as Uncle Rar) petitioned the court to sell it off. Hannah then relocated to Cleveland to live near Uncle Rar & her daughter (known as Aunt Sarah). She died in 1926 and is buried in Alliance along with her husband. Her son Thomas is also buried with her.

Cousin Eloise

This week I decided to shift it up just a bit and write about someone I actually remember - although fleetingly.

As a little girl, my paternal grandmother was no longer able to drive. My father would drive us to visit her which would often follow with trips to the store, deli, or other errands. Occasionally, "Cousin Eloise" would be in town.

Eloise sounded exotic and on the surface, oh boy a cousin to play with! The first few times she visited , I was too young to understand she was my grandmother's cousin - not mine. She was a Grant - a concept that I also failed to grasp until years later.

Cousin Eloise was my grandmother's first cousin - my great-grandmother Isabel Grant's brother, Robert, was Eloise's father. Although they were close in age, Eloise had married and moved to Texas; however, she never had children.

The early visits I don't quite recall what they did. Their last, it's quite vivid. We had two little old bitties in Tower City Center on the upper deck in the sunshine. My father, sister, and I sat at our own table. All the while grandma & Eloise would eat and talk by themselves. We would sometimes split up from them in the shops synchronizing watches to meet back up. It seemed though that they just wanted to talk - to connect. In retrospect it's as if they knew time was running out.

This was sometime circa 1996 or 1997. Eloise died the summer of 1998 and grandma died that spring in 1999.

A few years ago I found this yearbook picture of her from 1942 West Technical HS in Cleveland . The donated yearbook must have belonged to someone Eloise knew as she was one of the few signatures in the yearbook.