Saturday Challenge- How Many Ancestors Did You Meet?

From Randy Seaver on Saturday: Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!): 

1) Write down which of your ancestors that you have met in person (yes, even if you were too young to remember them).

2) Tell us their names, where they lived, and their relationship to you in a blog post, or in comments to this post, or in comments on Facebook.

This is a fairly easy one for me. The count ends at four.

Here is a picture of my Dad’s parents’ grandchildren at their 50^th wedding anniversary celebration, which would have been in 1960. I joke that it’s not fair- they left me out of the picture and instead included one great-granddaughter. The truth of the matter is, they thought they had all the grandchildren in the picture and never knew their mistake. They both died two years later and it was three years after that before I was even born.

So, here are the people that I have actually met:

Alice Ward- Mom. Although she lived in Skaneateles and Auburn, they were before I was born. From a little before I was born she lived on the farm in Moravia in the house that is in the background of the picture above. Her and Dad bought it off my grandparents’ estate. In later years she lives just outside of Auburn in the town of Owasco.

Gordon Ward (1919-1998)- Dad. He never lived in Skaneateles; that was Mom’s childhood home. He also lived on another farm from the one in the picture. It was to the north and east of there over the town line in the Town of Niles. That was for the first four years of his life. Otherwise, the places are the same as hers only with two different time periods living on the farm, the first time when his parents bought it while he was a child and then after their deaths when he and Mom owned it.  They had also spent their early married life in Moravia near the farm, first at the lake in a couple different cottages and then in what was referred to as “the tennant farm” just to the north of my grandparents on a small farm that my grandparents owned.

Marion Wooster (1896-1976) Grandpa. I’m not sure if I know all the places he lived. He was born in Sheldon, Iowa. His parents then came “home” to Lysander, NY and lived in Weedsport for a brief time just as he enlisted in the Army. He was stationed for a time at Fort Brown, Texas. During the end of his Army enlistment he and Grandma lived in rented places in Washington, DC before arriving in Skaneateles where his parents were living. They spent the rest of their lives in various houses in the village.

Alice Jennings Wooster (1893-1970). Grandma. She was born in Keelinga, Leap, County Cork Ireland and grew up on her father’s farm there. After immigrating at age 19, she lived in and around Boston. She enlisted in the Army Nurse’s Corp and was stationed at Fort Brown, Texas. The rest of her locations follow that of Grandpa. I know she was discharged while at Rantoul, IL, but I think that was a brief stay and not actually living there.