It was common for adult children to continue living with their parents even after marriage. Houses were limited and so was work outside of the farm. When my mother married and moved from my grandmother’s house, I continued to live with my grandmother and uncle until I was ten years old. I also lived much of the time with my dad and stepmother.

My mother and stepfather already had four children when I moved in with them. The house, three miles north of Caseyville, was shotgun style with four small rooms. Living space was very cramped. Soon after moving with my mother and stepfather, we moved five miles west of Caseyville to a sharecropper farm house with five rooms. My older twin sisters moved in with us bringing the household total to nine, four boys and three girls. The household would eventually grow to twelve and sometimes 15 because of our grandmother and other stepchildren. There were one to two beds in every room except the kitchen.

This was the fourth sharecropper house I had lived in. None were suitable for living in, but it was the best my mother and stepfather could find. There was no electricity. There was a well to draw water in front of the house. The windows in the house were all wood and swung open to the side. There was no insulation in the house and the ground could be seen through cracks in the floor and the outside seen through the cracks in the walls. Wooden latches were used to secure the doors from the inside and hooks from the outside. There was a fireplace for warmth and a wood burning stove in the kitchen for cooking and keeping warm. We did not have an inside or outside toilet. There were separate pathways down the hill into the bushes for females and for the males. Everyone had their personal log or stump and supply of paper pages from Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

Overcomer by Hope, the confident expectation of something good will happen.