Marcia Janie Mitchell Cham

Gertie Marcia Janie Mitchell Cham

It has been twenty years since I said Gertie's funeral. Her stories continue to be repeated at family gatherings. Her picture is on my desk and her joy for life pops out of the frame almost daily. So I had to write this memoir so that others could meet my maternal grandmother. She survived a mother who didn't mother, an absentee father, and being married at sixteen. She raised her seven children during rough economic times in New Straitsville, Ohio. She watched her sons go off to war and struggled with the sudden death of her husband when she was forty-five years old. Yet, she lived 95 years, 11 months, and 14 days by finding joy in simple things like receiving a corset as her only Christmas present and being kind to everyone she met. This memoir is to honor her determined soul and her hometown, New Straitsville, Ohio.