There are two sisters in my mother's family that I will talk about this week. However, they were not sisters to each other. What! you say. Well, they were each siblings of my maternal grandparents. My grandparents were Helen Boardman and Charles Bonadio. Helen and her sister Bertha, or Bea as she was called, appeared to be very close judging by the many photos we have of them. Charles's sister, Mae, also became very close to Helen. Helen and Charles were married in 1931 and within 3 years had two children, but in 1942, when Helen was just 29 years old, she developed a case of appendicitis and two weeks later died of complications from that. This left my mom, age 10, and her brother, age 8, with no mother. And Charles suddenly became a single father with a full time job in a mill. Both Bea and Mae stepped in to help Charles raise his children. Bea also worked full time in the same mill as Charles, so I am not sure of the logistics of all of this. I would think many in the families helped out. And for whatever reason, Charles never remarried. I like to think that he had found his one and only in Helen. While my mother would occasionally speak of her mother, Charles never did. So while Bea and Mae were aunts to my Mom, she was as close to both of them as she would have been to her mother and eventually, my sisters and I were treated like their granddaughters. Bea was married in 1936, but they never had any children of their own, so mom and her brother filled those roles somewhat. Mae was married in 1938 and did not have children until 1942, the same year that Helen died. Bea & Mae were not the only sisters in the families. Bea & Helen had two additional sisters and Charles had three sisters besides Mae. When Mom married in 1954, she moved away from her childhood home, but never lost the connections to her aunts. I have always wished we could have known Helen, she looked like a fun person. Some Photos shared below.
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