My Family: Chapter 34

Uncle Andy and Aunt Hannah

My Dad’s sister, Eloise, gave her daughter, Janice Sue,  to her sister, Hannah. Aunt Hannah had been married for twenty years but had no children of her own. She blamed herself because her husband, Tennie Day, had a child by his first wife. However, not too long after she took Janice in, Aunt Hannah re-met Andy Mazon. She already knew Andy well as Andy’s parents had been the neighbors of the Dillow’s at Dehue. Aunt Hannah had been 14 years old when she married Tennie Day, who was 15 years older than her. Tennie never liked to stay in one place for long, so they traveled with a circus. Aunt Hannah told fortunes until one day one of them came true and scared her. She gave it up and worked at something else.

Aunt Hannah decided to leave the circus life and came back to West Virginia. Tennie Day also left the circus but he turn into a hobo and jumped trains - that’s how he got killed. Then Aunt Hannah re-meets Andy, who was divorced from his first wife, at the restaurant where she worked. They started to date and then three months into the affair, Aunt Hannah finds out she’s going to have a baby. Andy and her get married and in the first four years they have three sons and in a few years more she has another son just not as quick. There’s about four years between the last two boys.  When Janice was about nine years old, Aunt Hannah let her go to Ohio to visit her family - only Aunt Eloise wouldn’t let her come back. I don’t think either Aunt Hannah or Janice Sue ever got over it. I know Aunt Hannah talked about it until the day she died.