How blessed you are to have met this woman (I never met any great-grandparents) - this amazing lady "brought via covered wagon from her birthplace in Texas to her mother's home state of California as a baby, at roughly six month of age (which would have been spring of 1883), and lived to see men walk on the moon." That time period had to be the most dramatic in terms of revolutionary, life-changing technological advances and inventions. I grew up feeling we were all that with our color TVs and cordless phones, and then came the internet, cell phones, satellites, and a new generation of tech-savvy kids who made me look more like a dinosaur than my grandma ever did.
But what's this: bras were silly for young girls...? A more innocent era, with more modest apparel?
You come from a most remarkable family!
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Yes, she was a one of a kind; a working woman in a day and time when few women of good family and upbringing were, but when she and her husband opened a general store in 1928, in Mescalero, New Mexico, it was she who became postmistress of the little post office in the store, and she indeed retired as postmistress some time after her husband died, and her son (my mother's uncle Stanley) and his wife took over the store and post office.
How's that for a run on sentence? Lol!
I remember her as being uber religious, and somewhat humorless, at least compared with the rest of our family; but as I've gotten older, I realize that she wasn't humorless at all, just more understated and decorous then the rest of our raucous bunch.
And it was she who told me some of the historical tidbits about the store and the local environs; such as the old woman she had befriended, not long after opening the store, who had once been engaged to a young man in town, but he was shot in the back, and she never married.
According to my great-grandmother, the young woman's fiance had saved up to buy a team of four matching carriage horses for their wedding, which was a fine gift indeed for his young bride.
Unfortunately, Billy the Kid happened by, spotted the fine team of horses, and determined to have them for his own.
The young man pleaded with him, explaining that they were a wedding gift for his bride-to-be. According to witnesses, the Kid muttered something in the affirmative, then shot the young man in the back as soon as his back was turned, took the horses, and rode off.
This happened at Blazer's Mill, which the last time I was back was still standing, and is a short distance from where the store stood.
Funny, though, the last time we drove through there, in early 2010, we drove right down the highway where the store stood, on what is now Hwy. 70, and I never spotted it, despite it being a large two-story 1870s adobe building, which sat right off the highway.
All I can figure is that they must have changed its appearance pretty drastically. The Mescalero Apache tribe bought it from Stanley's widow, Corinne, for whom I was named, I believe in the mid-80s or early 90s.
I absolutely loved that place.