52 Ancestors Week 10: Strong Woman

Katie Sandwina, "The Lady Hercules," lifting three men
Bain News Service / Public domain

It is incredibly difficult to narrow down the topic of "Strong Woman" to a single woman in my family. In just one generation--that of my great-grandparents--it is impossible to decide. There is Great-Grandma Flora (Amos) Underwood, who left England with her husband and infant son, to travel across the ocean on a journey to America, knowing she would never see her home in England again. She left a comfortable middle-class life for the unknown world of the western U.S., living almost a pioneer existence and learning the skills along the way.

There is Great-Grandma Cora (Wade) Brosius, who raised a family of six boys and one girl in Kansas, married to a man nearly twenty years older than she was. When he died and left her with four children who were still quite young, she packed those children into a car and the five of them drove across the country to the Pacific Northwest to begin their new lives.

There is Great-Grandma Mary (Craig) Stroesser, who grew up in "the Bottoms" in Omaha, a neighborhood marked by its shanty houses and poverty, and frequently flooded by the nearby Missouri River. She went on to marry and give birth to thirteen children, suffering post-partum depression after many of them according to family lore, and suffering also the deaths of three of her sons. Although Grandma Rose, her daughter, had a strained relationship with her, it seems clear that Great-Grandma Mary was battling her own demons.

Then there is Great-Grandma Hazel (Fox) Hoyt, who, according to family lore, graduated valedictorian. Unlike my other great-grandmothers, she began to work outside the home during WWII, and continued to work after the war was over. She was a shipping clerk at Dehner Boot Company until her retirement. She was also the only great-grandmother whose lifetime overlapped my own.

Truly, I believe that you could pluck almost any woman off my family tree and, looking at her life and circumstances, come to find that she deserves the appellation of a "Strong Woman."