OUR BRADFORD BLOODLINE

I Remember Gramma

Martha Adeline Bradford

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Gramma loved to sew and continued to sew a little every day of her life.  When I was a little girl, she made dresses for me (without using a pattern) which I still have to today [See the 6 photos below].  In her lifetime, she had been a seamstress as well as a housekeeper.  She continued to work well into her seventies at the Coye Awning Factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan for 90 cents an hour.  In a 1955 card to May Malson, wife of her uncle, William Alvia Malson, Gramma wrote, "I was 71 on May 13, still holding down 8 hour 5 day week job but I know the old gray mare is not what she used to be."

   

Always kind, loving and generous, my Gramma often took care of me while my mother worked.  Gramma made stuffed animals and quilts for me as well as baked homemade bread and cookies.  She never had much money but even so she would walk me down to the corner store on her street in Grand Rapids to buy me some treats.  We shared a very close, special bond and spent many happy times together.  I shall cherish the memories of those times forever.

   

When I was just 8 years old, I accompanied my Dad, Frederick Winfred Roberts, when he drove Gramma from Grand Rapids, Michigan back to Pennsylvania to be near where her daughter, Barbara Simms, was buried.  It was her wish that when she died she be buried next to Barbara, who had died January 7, 1922, and whom she missed and thought of every day.  

 

Gramma rented an old house in West Alexander, near the West Virginia border, where her brother, John Thomas Bradford, had moved the year before.  When Gramma's Social Security benefit was no longer sufficient to support her, she moved into the Maybelle Manor Nursing Home in Washington, Pennsylvania. She lived until her death November 18, 1971 at the age of 88. 

 

As Gramma had wished, she was buried next her daughter, Barbara, in Stone Church Cemetery at Elm Grove near Wheeling, West Virginia, and in the same plot as her first husband, Schriver Simms [See In Memorium page for photos].