Memories of Ann Elizabeth Powell HIbbard - Episode 7

My Mother was the middle child of seven children. There was an eighth child named Edmond David but he died in infancy and I don’t know just when he came in the sequence. The oldest was my Aunt Carrie. She married Ed Garvy. They had three children. The two oldest, a boy and a girl, were born before my grandmother’s youngest uncle Ed was an orphan and he delighted in all Aunt Carries relatives and took them for his own. In the 1920’s they were living on a farm in Wisconsin near Sloan Springs that he carved out of the woods. (You will read in this narrative a lot about the year 1920. That was a year that my mother, the three of us and Sleepy, spent a whole year in Leroy, Minn. and when I had a chance to know my relatives for the first time.) The McGinnis family was in Leroy, too, on a year’s leave from China. Uncle Ed & Aunt Carrie set up huge Army tents and a cook tent and we had a family reunion of all my mother’s sisters & brothers and all their families and kids for a week or more. Uncle Ed was so delighted with everything that he thought we ought to have Christmas. So he and all the fathers went into Duluth and came home with toys, candy, ice cream and he had a Santa Clause suit and we had Christmas in July in the woods in Wisconsin! This is a little out of place to tell this incident but I wanted to show how much fun Uncle Ed was and why he was such a favorite with his nieces and nephews. 

The next child was aunt Anna. She went to China as a young woman to be a missionary. She told me one time that she was driving home in a buggy one night from a prayer meeting when she received “a call” from God to go to China. Her family was the one of my mother’s that we knew the best. Not only did we spend the year in Minnesota together but we traveled from the Orient by boat & train together and also they visited us in Manila. In China she met Uncle James McGinnis who she married. He was the a missionary and the son of a missionary. He also was a favorite. He had a never ending supply of stories and both he & Aunt Anna had a wonderful sense of humor. they had five children, twins David & Jonathan, Griffith, Paul and Ann Elizabeth. They were the cousins we knew best, especially Paul and Ann who were closest to my age.