Mom's Marriage and My Birth

There is a 20-year gap (from 1918 to 1938) in the pictures of my ancestors. That was the time when the Curtiss family was so poor that it could barely provide food and shelter let alone take photographs. Photos would have been such a luxury! During that time, Lizzie married Tom Moss and they began another family of four.

My mother was little more than a child when she began to sew in order to make her clothes and her surroundings beautiful. She embroidered small flowers on her homemade underwear so it would look nice! That was the beginning of her sewing career at which she excelled all her life. She made her own wedding dress and those of her sisters and her niece and probably others that I do not know about. She could create her own patterns and design and make anything.

My mother left home when she was fifteen and worked as a farm hand and/or house maid for other people. She and her brothers and sister sent money home for the younger children and their mother. They weren't always sure the money was used for sustaining the home.

So my mother was married on her 19th birthday in 1938. Her husband was Vernon Oliver Barber and he was about 9 years older than she was. He was the first man she ever kissed. Of course, it was important to her mother that Esther be a virgin on her wedding night. But the marriage came about mostly because my grandmother thought it was a good idea. I don't think my mother was "in love" with my father. The wedding night was a disaster and, as my Mom described it to me years later, it was a matter of "slam, bam, thank-you mam." Almost a year later, I was born and the top photo shows the three of us together.

My father was probably a manic-depressive or bi-polar as medical people refer to these things now. He was a ne-er-do-well: he couldn't hold down a permanent job; he had delusions of success which would make him expremely happy and then would have deep depression when his fanciful plans came to nothing. Physically, he was born with a club foot although I don't know whether or not he limped. He was enamoured of evangelical religion just as my grandmother was and I think that was the reason she pushed for the marriage. My father sometimes was an itinerant preacher, which must have really enamoured him to my grandmother who would seek such people out.

The marriage was attended by 19 people including Mom's sisters, Theta (a witness) and Ruth, their oldest brother, Daniel, and my grandmother, Helen Boyce Barber, and her husband, Jack J. Barber.

My Grandmother, Helen Barber, was a wonderful friend to my mother even after my mom divorced her son sometime after the birth of my brother in 1941.

(Back to Mom's Marriage)