A to Z April Challenge: L is for Lorraine

“We need to get together more often and not at a funeral.” How many times have you and a cousin said that? Funerals are much like a family reunion. You can learn a lot about a family just by looking at who showed up. Using my grandparents’ guest books and sympathy cards, I’ll be exploring “Who came to the funeral?”

is for Lorraine Keim. She was not a member of the family but nonetheless she attended the funeral of my maternal grandfather Orvin Davis in 1963. Her connection to my family reads like the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon game.

Connection #1

A school picture shows that Lorraine undoubtedly knew several members of my family. In her class were Rosalind Rucker, my grandmother’s sister. Also Granddaddy’s cousins Leota and Elta Sullivan attended school with Lorraine Keim.

Shenandoah School 1918
#1 Rosalind Rucker, #2 Leota Sullivan
#3 Elta Sullivan, #4 Lorraine Keim
scanned from Shenandoah: A History of Our Town and Its People

Connection #2

The census records show that Lorraine and her widowed mother lived in the same rented house from 1920 to at least 1940, right next door to my grandmother’s uncle Robert Rucker. There were many opportunities for the families to get to know one another.

Keims' house on the left
Ruckers' house on the right
Third Street, Shenandoah, Virginia

Lorraine’s mother Hettie Keim was a widow most of her life. Her husband Adam, a carpenter for the railroad, apparently was badly burned and died in Hagerstown, Maryland. Lorraine spent the rest of her life with her mother, never marrying.

Connection #3

Lorraine signed the Guest Book right after Floyd Eppard. Floyd was my grandmother’s cousin. He was also an officer of the First National Bank there in Shenandoah. In the 1930 and 1940 census, Lorraine was a bookkeeper at a bank. And that bank was none other than FNB. In fact, she retired from FNB, and she and Floyd posed for a keepsake photo. If Lorraine retired at a normal retirement age, she did not live much longer.  She died at age 68 in 1969.

Floyd Eppard on the left with Lorraine
scanned from Shenandoah: A History . . . 

Lorraine may not have been related, but she was a part of my family’s lives for many years.

Don’t let the labyrinth of lampoons and belles-lettres languish at the A to Z April Challenge.

© 2015, Wendy Mathias.  All rights reserved.