Oliver & Anna Marriage Announcement

Anna Lawless

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I am working on adding more detail to the Anna Lawless story. This part of her story is about her life before she got married.

I found a bunch of letters that were written to Anna while she was at St. Joseph’s Academy in Clyde Missouri, 1907-1909. There are also letters sent to her at home at other times. Many of the letters are about what is going on at home. Her mother wrote a lot, her father and siblings wrote a few, and her friends wrote some.

Some of the things the letters said were also social items in the local newspapers. When all that is put together, we get a nice picture of what their life was like. Not all of the text of the letters will be put into the story. That would make the story very long and would probably bore everyone. I am scanning the letters for an electronic copy and also making a hard copy. The originals are stored in a notebook in plastic sleeves.

How did these letters survive for over 100 years? Anna must have kept them and took them with her when she moved to Lyons with Oliver and they traveled with her during her moves. When she went on the road in the late 1930s, she left things stored at her “cottage” on the Old Brown House property. At some point they ended up with her son Victor Johnson where they passed to me when he went into assisted living. Don and I spent many Sundays going through Victor’s stuff and that is how I came to have letters, photos, and the films that have been turned into YouTube videos. See the Videos link on this Web site.

Many thanks are due to our ancestors who kept these treasures.