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June 2, 2002- Apparently, I am the youngest member of this generation of Alexanders who is interested in the old stories. Bunner is now 97 and nearly deaf, so is very hard to talk with. She is the last of the REAL Alexanders, and lives in the LA area (Altadena.) Although I am nominally a Williams, I think of myself more as an Alexander. I identify more with them since they were cosmopolitan, well-educated, musical, artistic, and all that good stuff. I am named Gretchen (little Gret) after my paternal grandmother, Margarethe Regina Alexander, whose demise is still thought of as unspeakably horrid. I hope to dig it up and expose it to the daylight. I think it had to do with severe post partum depression, confinement, restraint, and blood poisoning. She was in her mid-twenties or so... but Grandpa Williams was the Hennepin County Attorney, and could have had it all covered up.
The Williamses knew how to argue and make money. They did well with knowing a whole lot about drinking, too. I have some of their traits, minus the alcoholism, thank god! I argue rather well. Money? I enjoy spending it.
My maternal grandmother, Isla Woolley Tallman, died at age 97 in a "rest home" here in Auburn, since I had inherited care of her after my mother's death. She refused to talk to me about anything familial, saying she had already told it all to my mother. (That didn't do any of the rest of us any good at all!) I also did inherit all the boxloads of that side's scrapbooks and diaries, and who knows what else. It is all downstairs in the storeroom. It is being well preserved. Maybe I will look at what is down there some time. No one seems to be even the slightest bit interested, except me - but I am the oldest, and I guess this kind of responsibility is part of that position. I know that Aunt Ruth did all the necessary research for the DAR, so it is also down there. That side does go back to the American Revolution! (all Brits, I think...)
Maybe I feel a Family History Quilt coming on... At least some of this should come out as visual images!
Gretchen
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