When Great Grandfather Spencer's wife died, he had a daughter Rosetta. Then, he remarried someone we know as Aunt Jose. She had a younger brother, my Grandfather, Frank Edward Bracewell. I don't know how old Frank was when his sister married my great grandfather (Spencer). But, it is possible he was early teen and he and Aunt Jose raised them in one household. Anyway, he married Rosetta when she was sixteen and he wasn't much older. When Grandfather Spencer married Aunt Jose that made his sister, Aunt Jose, his mother in law. By the time he and my Grandma were twenty years old they had three children.
So my father Ray Bracewell his, older brother, Frank, and sister, Edna, were raised under extremely primative conditions. Their beds were homemade straw mattresses, 4 posts and ropes, with three feather beds underneath and two feather beds on top, comfortable and warm. They didn't wear pajamas and all they wore in the daytime were overalls. The only food they had to eat was in season. If you have an apple tree you know how many apples you would get off of that in a whole year (not a lot) it only lasts for a couple weeks. My grandfather was a good farmer he always had a good vegetable garden and he was noted for being able to build a haystack which would shed rain so the hay inside would not spoil.
Ray had to go to eighth grade two years and later somehow he took a test and won a scholarship to a boarding high school in Jacksonville, IL when he was 17. After he graduated he taught in a one room country school for a year. The boys would wait on one side of the creek to see if the teacher could jump across the creek to have school. He also worked on a road gang where the men refused to paint a wooden bridge covered with poison ivy. He was practically immune to poison ivy so he volunteered to paint the bridge but he was careless and didn't wash afterwards and got a small case on his hands. A similar thing happened to Dad's father, Frank Woods, but he got a bad case of poison ivy. Frank Woods during the depression had been laid off from his job as a iron molder and had to find work with the works progress administration to help those unemployed (WPA). He caught a terrible case of poison ivy which practically crippled both his legs for several weeks or even possibly months.

Now back to Ray. After teaching country school for one year, Ray entered Illinois College at Jacksonville and received a BA. He had several jobs while he was attending college, one was selling shoes in a shoe store and another was as an usher at an opera house. The first music he ever heard at the Opera House was the Tales of Hoffman. He thought it was gorgeous. An important part of his time was spent getting up very early, like 4 in the morning, and starting the furnace fires for the people in several houses. This was hard work and very hard on his system. It may have had permanent effects on his health.

When he graduated he became the assistant principal of Springfield, IL which is a big school. My mother, Gertrude Effting, attended University of IL in Champagne, IL.

Their manner of dating was they would each buy a cup of buttermilk and walk to the cemetery and drink the buttermilk. Margaret says the buttermilk is like the ice cream we get today. So they didn't splurge like we do today. My Dad told my mother that she must have a lot of clothes and you know all your clothes were handmade then. My mother's secret was to wear a different dress each day so that it looked like she had a lot of clothes.

My Dad was living in Springfield IL. He would come to Chicago and take my mother to the Light Opera. One of the operettas they saw the Student Prince