In week three of the 52 Ancestors Challenge, the theme is “Tough Woman.” I found myself asking just what constitutes toughness in a woman.  I have chosen my grandfather’s second wife, Effie Lucretia Daughters, as the subject of my blog this week. She was tough and strong in a quiet way.  Her biggest strength was her uncompromising good character – a trait that she passed on to her step-daughters.

My grandmother, Alma Maier Lindner, died on 11 August 1926 of septicemia related to an impacted wisdom tooth. She and my grandfather, Otto Lindner, had been married just six years. My grandfather was suddenly left with two small girls, ages two and five. I am not sure exactly how my grandfather met Effie Daughters. I believe they was introduced by a mutual friend. Otto was definitely looking for a wife.  On 3 September 1927, they married in Cincinnati. Effie was 47 years old at this time and had never been married before. She was nearly 10 years older than my grandfather. Effie was not a handsome woman and this may have had a lot to do with why she was unwed until she was in her mid-forties.

Effie Daughters at Age 20

Effie was born 1 September 1880 in Kentucky to Ira Daughters and Alice Utz Daughters. She had one brother, Ira Ward Daughters. I remember hearing that Effie’s father was an alcoholic and that he was abusive. Generally, I had the impression that Effie did not have a very happy home life. Ira was an insurance solicitor in 1900, but both Effie and her brother worked in factories at ages 19 and 17 respectively. I could not verify it, but I believe they may have gone to work earlier than that. Effie is listed in the 1900 census as a finisher in a toy factory; in 1910 she was a employed as an embroiderer. My mother had always told me that her mother (meaning Effie) was a seamstress. We have a quilt in the family that was made by her and I have a doll quilt that she made for me when I was small.

Effie never had children of her own, but she raised my mother and my aunt as though they were her own. This is what my mother told me as a child when she first informed me that Grandma Lindner was not my real grandmother. She said that Effie was her mother, because she was the only mother she really ever knew. I was told through the years, though, that grandpa married Effie because he needed a mother for his children. It isn’t exactly a romantic story, but this seems to have been very common in times past. My aunt and sister were living with relatives until their father married Effie.

Effie was a practical, down-to-earth, no-nonsense woman. She had a pithy saying about for nearly everything. I laugh at myself because these folksy adages still come out of my mouth from time-to-time. I realize that they came to me from my mother who, in turn, had learned them from Effie. They were sayings like “pretty is as pretty does,” “a stitch in time saves nine,” and, one of my favorites, “visitors and fish stink after a few days.” Effie wasn’t a complainer, but she did get frustrated with modern technology that didn’t last. When the electric vacuum broke, she blurted out with exasperation, “Well, that wasn’t much good, it only lasted nineteen years!”

Effie was a tireless worker. She must have worked supporting her family from her teens until she married my grandfather. According to the 1940 census, she completed the 8th grade and I wonder if she left school to go to work. Effie had little thought for herself and was always doing for others. I recall that, through her church, she and my grandfather would travel to Harlan County Kentucky on a mission to help provide assistance to the poor. I know that she would talk about the poverty that they saw there, and these were my first impressions of an impoverished Appalachia where I would live later in my life.

Effie, herself, was a very frugal woman. Of course, she was raising a family in the Great Depression, so I suppose this is not that unusual. Everything that could be saved and reused was; clothing was handed down to the next child, or a cousin, or a neighbor; when clothing was not longer serviceable, it was made into something else or turned into rags. Even spare pieces of string were saved. If she wore make-up it was used sparingly and her dress was never flashy.

Effie Daughters Lindner

I don’t know what kind of a relationship Effie had with my grandfather, or even if they loved one another. They seemed happy enough, although, I am sure that Effie put up with a lot with my grandfather’s teasing and joking. She seemed to take it in stride. For a while she dealt with grandpa’s not so very nice Uncle Gus living in their household.

To me Effie Daughters represents an era of women who did not have many choices in their lives. They lived to make good homes for their families and to train their children with strong values so they would grow up to be good people. It cannot have been easy to have been single for 47 years before taking on another woman’s children to raise.  Effie died in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 3 May 1971 at the age of 90.