Twenty Eight

Twenty Four was the name of a popular TV show and I have to admit I've never seen it. My brother in law Tom was enamored with it and tried to get me hooked but failed. At the same time he turned me on to The Office with a lot more success.

Twenty Eight is the number of years my grandmother lived.

You have to wonder what may have been if she lived longer. I had only been married a couple years at age 28. Our first daughter was only one.

In my Dad's family his mother died when he was three but she had already born five sons in ten years of marriage and had another child who died soon after birth.

Ila Rowell Green was born in 1887 and died in 1915. She had been sickly and apparently died of heart problems.

She was born as the oldest child of Seth David Rowell and Martha Jane Williams Rowell in the Shady Grove community of Taylor County Florida. Her father's family had lived in the area even before it was part of the United States.

After her death my Grandpa tried to raise five sons as best as he could but he wasn't the most loving father. He remarried once for only a few months and had a series of live-in housekeepers. But he was never wealthy and I am sure was much harder inside because he lost his wife so young.

I have a letter her son Bryant wrote to his aunt a few years before he died in WWII and he laments that his mother had died when he was an infant and wondered how life would have been had she lived.

A sad coincidence is that Ila's sister Mary Rowell Grantham died at age 28 also just a few years after her.