140 years ago today, my Great-Grandmother died. She was only 38 years old and she had 8 young children. One daughter, Lucille Beatrice, preceded her in death. Her daughter, my Aunt Elsie paid the following tribute to her mother in 1998:
“My mother was very beautiful, intelligent and a truly gifted woman. As I remember her when I was 7 years old and younger, she had brown eyes and an abundance of brown hair which she often wore in braids wound around her head like a crown. I cherish the memory of her warm and loving spirit. “She was skilled with her hands in dressmaking, knitting, crocheting, embroidering and tatting. I have a dainty handkerchief that has at least an inch of tatting using fine thread on the border, which she made.” “I remember some of the meals we had such as on Sundays with a beef roast, brown gravy over Yorkshire pudding and always a nice cake or pie. I was brought up with a taste for fruitcake at Christmas and plum pudding. Having a store to draw from, my mother did a lot of canning, everything from fruit to jam and chili sauce. “. . . They raised eight children, working together to teach and guide them in school and at Church and through all the trials of life. “My mother was subject to asthma, and when she had bronchial pneumonia, they did not have the drugs to fight is as we do today. As a result she died when she was 38 years old and I was only seven. I remember as we drove to the cemetery that we were seeing lilacs everywhere in bloom.”
It was interesting to me when I found her obituary in the Deseret Evening News on microfillm at the BYU Library, that there was an article on the same page about the sinking of the Titanic. Just a month before, on April 15th, the Titanic went down in the Atlantic. Just a few months later, on September 12th, my Grandma Elsa Schaefer, set sail, leaving her home in Germany for America. She was 17 years old. How very interesting to me that these women, one going Home, and one coming to this home, never stood on the same continent. But their blood flows through my heart now, and I am here because of choices they made. I love my grandmothers for that. 
