Margaret Lafferty was much in our household when I was young.  She was an old maid and she had lost all her family and they were numerous.  Don't know what took the family - but she was left behind.

She was dying in 1916 when we first arrived in Augusta, she would make herself vomit and take many different concoctions of medicines - all, I suppose, to help her on the way to the promised land.  I learned all this trouble as a child when she came to our house to visit my mother and to advise her on how to raise her children.

What I didn't know at the time is that my mom and Maggie, as we always knew her by, were students together at Eureka School, the one that I taught at for one year, back in the latter l880's and perhaps into the 1890's.  If you could have those two back to help you, Mag and Mom, you would learn much about the Ashbrooks, McGranahans, Turnipseeds, etc. They talked about this stuff (that is what I thought it was) for hours.

Maggie kept dying from 1916 until she reached the ripe old age of 85 in 1963.  My mother, a healthy woman when she was talking to Maggie, the poor dying soul, my mother died in 1939 and Maggie kept dying for 24 years thereafter.  And while she was dying she was able to pick strawberries with anyone who thought they were good at that job as she was a wonderful berry picker.