February 27, 1945 (Tuesday)

MORE WATER IN BASEMENT

---

A nice day — sunny

but quite cold.

Henry went to Road

Comm meeting.

I washed to-day.

Basement floor covered with 1 inch of water again.

Very tired to-night.

---

Most of the time, there are one or two or even several things that Edna writes in her daily journal entries that peak my curiosity. Today was not one of those days.

Would I like to know a bit more about the meeting Henry went to or how they managed the return of water in the basement? Yes. But I doubt I can find much about either of those things by looking at the archives of the local papers or through Google searches.

Instead, I decided to read through the archived copy of the Lowell Ledger that covered this date in history to see what else was happening in the area. That lead me to a brief mention of another one of my great grandmothers, Lizzie Hoover.

Lizzie was the mother of nine boys and a girl. Leo Augustine Hoover, my grandfather, was one of the ten children born to Lizzie and John Hoover.

I never met my grandfather. He died in 1953 when my mom, Sally, was in the 8th grade. Her sisters, Jane, Mary Ann and Jill were all younger than her. My grandmother, Maxine, never remarried. She passed away in 1997, 44 years after her husband.

Four years after my grandmother passed away, in 2001, my first child, Maxine Eleanor Tewsley, was born.

But let's get back to Lizzie. In February of 1945, five of Lizzie's sons, George, Henry, Mike, Andrew, and Jacob, are enrolled in the service. George, Henry and Mike are serving overseas. All three of them were at D-Day and have been embroiled in many other battles.

Lizzie is also still newly widowed. Her husband John passed away just a few months earlier, in May of 1944, after being trampled by a horse.

I was excited to stumble across a mention of my great grandmother Lizzie Hoover while researching my great grandmother Edna Johnson.

Both Edna and Lizzie raised large families and were farmer's wives. Edna is fortunate that none of her children were called into service. In 1945, five of Lizzie's nine boys are serving their county. Edna's husband is living while Lizzie's recently perished. But Edna's family has faced adversity as well.

These woman have recently survived the Great Depression and are currently living through a world war.

I find myself wishing I could read Lizzie's journals. Maybe she didn't keep journals like Edna. Maybe she did and they have been lost over the years. No journals of hers, that I know of, exist today.

So it is that my heart is lifted a bit when I see the brief mention in the Lowell Ledger from March 1, 1945 that two of Lizzie's sons and their spouses paid her a visit on the previous Sunday.

Elizabeth (Lizzie) Anna Feuerstein Hoover, who was born on May 10, 1881, passed away on September 15, 1950. All of her children, with the exception of my grandfather (and an infant that passed away the day after he was born), would live to be nearly 80 or well into their 80s.

This past summer, my daughter Maxine and I attended the 69th annual family reunion of the John and Lizzie Hoover family.

John and Lizzie Hoover Family at a reunion on their homestead around 2010