Bessie Mae Moore
Sex: F
Individual Information
Birth: 14 May 1884-14 May 1885 - Dauphin Co, Pennsylvania
Christening:
Death: 5 Dec 1946 - Carlisle, Cumberland, Pennsylvania
Burial: in Arlington Cemetery, Upper Darby, Pennsylvania
Cause of Death: Stroke, second of two beg age 59
AFN #:
Parents
Father: Charles Moore (1859-1920)
Mother: Carrie Dehart (1862-1938)
Spouses and Children
1. *William Henry Smith Jr. (23 Sep 1879 - 18 Aug 1942)
Marriage: 5 Apr 1911 - philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Status:
Children:
1. Willard Smith (1912-1969)
2. Rev. Russell Drayton Smith (1919-2001)
Notes
General:
Death certificate says she died of cardio-vascular disease, due to arterio-sclerosis, other condtions cerebral hemmorhage. She was only 62 years old. Newpaper article mentioned a long illness.
My mother says that Bessie Mae, and not her mother, was the frail elderly woman in the wheelchair in their backyard. "Bessie Mae Moore Smith sufferred a massive stroke which confined her to a wheelchair and, eventually, to bed. She was an invalid for several---I don't know how many---years." I thought that was who my father said it was, but Carrie also lived there and also was an invalid. My mother did not know Carrie was an invalid. If it was Bessie Mae she must have seriously aged between 1935 and 1942. My mother says that my father and Aunt Irma took turns caring for Bessie Mae in her last years.
Willlard Smith, 76 Bryn Mawr Road, Lansdowne, PA informant. bureid ARlington Cemtery, Uperr darby, PA Funeral director Uri D Lutz, 219 N Havoer St, Carlisle. She lived at 146 W Louther St. Carlisle, at death. But perhaps it was my father's turn to look after her.
As a child, Bessie Mae was plain and sober looking, in contrast to her pretty, sulky and seductive looking sister. (They were both approximately 5 to 8 years old.) It looked as if their mother, herself an ugly duckling, had dressed up Nellie and styled her hair, but left Bessie Mae's straight and cut her bangs sraight across at a particularly ugly angle.
Cousin Dorothy mentioned tension between Bessie Mae's plain, down to earth ways and her mother and sister who I gather were into fashion and that sort of thing, and somewhat snobby. Father was a lifelong iron roller, and his father was a landless laborer, but Bessie Mae learned to teach piano playing and to be a stenographer.
Pictures of Bessie Mae as a young woman show a slim, pretty woman, somewhat dark complexion, quite stylishly dressed.
Two pictures of Bessie Mae around age 50, in Carlisle, taken by the same relatives on teh same afternoon, show variously a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman wiht nice Pennsylvania-Dutch features, and a plain dour woman. She and my 16 year old father next to her had on identical dour expressions; it was quite comical.
My father had letters from her that my sister has since destroyed, but my brother quoted from one to me. She was discussing Willard's pot belly. "But then too much beer will do that." Willard, who had a normal, outgoing and intense temperament, was the scapegoat in a basically too quiet and asocial family.