| Notes |
- - From a biography by Maude's granddaughter, Charlene Beasley Moore [http://www.rootsweb.com/~alpike/bios/mbeasley.txt]
MAUDE ESTELLE KELLEY
Maude Estelle Kelly was the only girl of ten children and was born right in the middle. She always said that she came along just in time to help her mother, Nancy Elizabeth Griffin Kelly, with all of them. She toted a baby on her hip so often when she was growing up that the hip had begun to make a fairly loud cracking sound when she walked. One day her father, Thomas Madison Kelly, heard it and was much alarmed. He would not let her carry the babies on her hip anymore...
...Her father conducted Sunday Services in their front parlor as a layman and she was his pianist. Her hands were very twisted with arthritis by the time I knew her, but even then she could play a lively hymn, which she did without any music from which to read...
...She said that the summer of 1912 Ed proposed. Ed was quite a catch. He was 23 years old, one of those handsome Beasley boys from over at Needmore and a school teacher to boot. Her father, Thomas Madison Kelley, had given her a cotton patch and told her that if she would not marry that year she could have all the profit from that patch. Ed proposed on the way home from a "cemetery workin'" by asking her to "Be his Rainbow", a reference to a popular song of the time. She married in August and the cotton patch and all its riches was forgotten...
...Granny dipped snuff and if you got a bug bite or sting of some kind she would daub on a little wet snuff to fix it. I don't know if it was the snuff of the attention, but I was always instantly better...
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1893 - 1981 (87 years)
[2] 
