I was born October 21, 1887, in Posey County, Indiana. My parents were Solomon Edgar Chamberlin and my mother was Caroline Barbara (Zeigler) Chamberlin. They lived in a small frame house on forty acres that my mother's father had willed to her at his death in 1875, when my mother was only 15 years of age. My brother, George Edgar, was born at the same place two years later October 12, 1889, on our father's birthday.
   My father didn't have the money to clear the land and buy tiling to drain it, as the land was heavily forested, so they sold it and bought forty acres in Illinois. At first we lived in a log house, until my father built a frame one. I was very young but I remember my mother letting me carry small articles to the new house the day we moved just across the yard. We had a white picket fence around the yard. My mother had beautiful flowers growing on each side of the walk leading from the house to the yard gate. In back of the house was a large locust tree with a split log for a seat and that is where George and I played.
   We were happy those years. My father owned a beautiful team of white horses that he used to do his farming. There was a cow, chickens, a big garden and an orchard, so we had plenty to eat and there was wood to heat and cook with.
   I usually went with my father to do chores. One morning he told me I couldn't go. Well, I followed anyway. When he saw me, he got a little switch and switched my legs. I never followed again. I knew when he spoke, he meant it, tho he never scolded or punished me again.
   On October 11, 1894, a third child was born, Myrtle May, in Hamilton County, Illinois.
   The next summer my father was able to buy a six-foot McCormick Deering binder. Before that he had cut what wheat he raised with a mowing scythe.
   At harvest time my mother was called to the bedside of her sister, Kate, in Indiana who was seriously sick. So mama and the baby left for Indiana, leaving George and I in Papa's care as well as the wheat harvest.
   Papa cooked our breakfast, I washed the dishes and George stood on a box and dried them. Then we could play. But at nine o'clock we would take papa a drink.
   Our mother was gone two or three weeks. soon after returning home, our father became sick with Typhoid fever. A man nurse helped to nurse him the first two weeks and then Mama's two nieces, Rosa and May Carson came from Indiana and stayed until July 7, 1895, the day Papa died.
   I can recall the day of the funeral. Some one took us to the train, which had Papa's casket on it. Uncle Rome Burleson was to meet us at Caborn, Indiana. When the train arrived and put us all off in that boiling hot sun, no one was there, and we had to wait an hour. A mistake in the train's arrival had been made.
   Our father is buried near Caborn at the Old German Methodist Church where most of our mother's family is buried.
   (Carol and Clytice, daughters of George Chamberlin visited the cemetary in 1971.) My mother and father had only been married ten years, but as she so often told us, he never said one cross work to her in that ten years.
   Our grandfather died about two years before our father. I remember seeing him on his sick bed and going to the funeral.
   George and I worshiped our father. A word here about father's life. His mother died when he was only two years old. Also there was an older brother, Joseph, who went to Evansville, Indiana as a young man. In the meantime my grandfather had remarried and there were three more sons; David, Walter, and Robert. (Uncle Walter was our favorite uncle, as he would play with we children and we would tie him to his chair thinking we could keep him. Uncle Dave was my second year teacher.)
   Our father felt slighted of parent love, so he ran away from home at age fourteen, walked the forty miles on railroad track between his home in Illinois to Evansville, Indiana. What kind of work he did from then until he met and married Mama, I never knew.
   Let's go back now to the days following our father's death. When the farm and all else was sold, my mother had a load of furniture, one horse and a spring wagon, six hundred dollars and three small children, ages one year, six and eight. Uncle Rome Burleson, Aunt Anna;s husband and Mama's brother, George Zeigler, drove their teams to Illinois, loaded up and the following morning we left for Indiana. We never went back to Illinois again. Our step-grandmother and Uncle Walter came to see us once and eventually correspondence stopped, so all contact between the families was lost.
   On arriving in Indiana, we first lived in a small house, which belonged to Mama's sister Kate. It stood right on the road --no fence--in a little village called Lick-Skillet. The men mostly made their living hauling saw-logs to the saw mill. At that time there were lots of fine trees being cut from the forests. Lick-Skillet got its name by someone saying the people were so poor they had to lick the skillet.
   My mother sewed for others when she could get the work. She kept a few chickens and raised a garden. She also helped Aunt Kate at times, who was a semi-invalid whose husband owned a big farm a mile away in the Ohio River bottoms.
   I remember one evening in winter, Mama bundled us all up, put Myrtle in George's little wagon, took our nighties and said we were going to Aunt Kate's for the night as tomorrow was to be hog killing day. In those days, the families butchered enough meat to last during the year.
   We traveled along the narrow road through the woods, always on the watchout for a wild hog that roamed that part of the woods. We arrived safely and all retired at an early hour. Mama, George, and Myrtle slept upstairs. It was a rambling house with three separate stairways. It had been built before the Civil War when Uncle Alvin Dixon's folks had kept slaves, so they used the kitchen stairs. There was a separate stairway leading to the boys' room and one to the girls' room. Next morning at 4:00 a.m. Uncle Alvin was up, poking fire in the fireplace and building a fire in the cook stove. Then he went back to bed for the house to warm up some.
   In a few minutes Mama was at the stair door and said, "Alvin, I smell smoke!" He jumped up, looked, and the kitchen was all ablaze. Mama ran back and got Myrtle and George, and we all grabbed our clothes and ran out in our night clothes and bare-footed. The man who was to help butcher, saw the fire and ran up. Not much was saved--an organ and some bedding was all. An enlarged baby picture of me was burned. After that, life was a nightmare for we children. aunt Kate collapsed and was bedfast for several weeks. They had to come to our little house to live and Uncle Alvin wouldn't allow we children to stay in the house, tho Mama had to do the work and care for Aunt Kate (their only child, sixteen-year old Ethel, had never been taught to work.)
   After a week or more, Uncle Rome came. He told Mama he would take we children home with him. for weeks we three were shifted from Uncle Romes' to Uncle Clay Carsons' to Uncle George Zeiglers', then back to Uncle Romes'. In the meantime Mama had sold the white horse, as the horse ran away and kicked the dashboard off of the buggy. Mama got her stopped before she broke loose or got away.
   Uncle Rome and Aunt Anna decided we children needed to see our mother. so Uncle Rome went after Mama and we all cried, we were so happy to see each other. The older ones decided it wasn't fair, so Uncle Rome took Mama back that afternoon, told her brother-in-law if she couldn't keep her children she couldn't stay, and he said "no children". She got her clothes and came back with Uncle Rome, as bad as she hated to leave her sick sister, who only lived a short time after that. After that, Uncle Rome helped Mama rent a house in the little village of West Franklin, which was situated on the Ohio River. There was a grocery store, saloon, post office and a church. Quite a few families made their living fishing with hoop-net.
   After we were settled in our new home, Mama rented out one room and also sewed for other folks. cotton men's shirts were twenty-five cents, men's cotton pants were fifty cents and a woman's dress was the same price. A wedding dress or a burial shroud was one dollar and fifty cents. She had loaned her money at six percent, which gave her thirty-six dollars a year interest. Out of that she paid thirty of it for rent and bought coal with the other six dollars. She had to raise a garden and make enough money sewing to buy flour and other necessary foods and our shoes. Of course shoes were only fifty cents to a dollar a pair and we children wore mostly made-over clothes.
   We lived there a year, then Uncle Rome told Mama that if she would let him use one hundred dollars of her money, he and his brother Tom, would build her a three-room box house on his farm just across his barn lot, and we could live there as long as wanted. So she gave her consent. Every spring Mama whitewashed our little house inside and out and also our picket fence around the house.
   Then Mama put out flowers, tall sunflowers at the back door with little red morning glories climbing over them. By a stump were all colors of violets--in fromt were chrysanthemums, bleeding heart, and yellow roses.
   Mama still sewed until twelve or one o'clock many nights to finish a garment. I would sit up and read aloud to keep her awake or I would fall asleep. George and Myrtle were put to bed as soon as the dished were washed. George and I attended the Darnell School where all our cousins did, too.
   That was our third school after coming to Indiana, the first was Crunk School and we had some bitter experiences there. A big bully would grab our lunch pail, then throw it down on George's cap and run with it. We had one friend, Oscar King, who took us across the fields so as not to go the same road the older boy went. Our second school was a two-room school, West Franklin, where we walked about one and one-half miles. So we were glad and happy when we could go the half mile to Darnell School.
   At home I know it was a struggle for my mother, tho she never complained. during the summer months I took care of Aunt Anna's two youngest boys, Dewey and Raymond. I washed dishes, swept porches and back yard, also would have to sew a ball of carpet rags. After that I was free to read or play till supper time. I also had to spend the night there, too, tho I wanted to be home with my own family. But that is how I earned my school clothes. They didn't cost much, a jacket was one and a half dollars--calico three cents a yard. Oh yes, it took five or six yards for a dress--stockings were twenty-five cents a pair. I look back on my childhood and young girlhood, then look at my granddaughters and know why they can hardly believe this story is true, and I've left out some incidents. We just had the plainest of food. We cousins had a good time together. When our work was done, we could climb the straw piles and no one cared, till cousin Will Zeigler rolled onto a straw knife the hired man had left in the straw. Willie cut his leg awful bad--that stopped our playing on Uncle George's straw stack, but Uncle Rome owned a threshing machine and we could play all over it or keep house inside, so we found places to play. As I grew up, there were apple peelings and peach cuttings to go to and taffy pullings in the fall after sorghum cookings. I can imagine I smell the rich brown gingerbread and sweet cider that was served us after the apples were all peeled, cored and sliced for drying or peaches were halved with seeds out to dry. The next day these peaches and apples were spread on sheets laid on boards or the proch roof to dry in the sun.
   We gathered in a group as a rule and walked to these parties, which were never more than a mile away, and by ten o'clock all were home in bed. Of course these parties were mostly in the summertime on bright moonlit nights and everyone sang as we walked home. Mostly songs of the South or of the Civil War. But our Indiana song was sung and "Down on the Wabash". Those were the most carefree days of my life.
   Oh yes, I had boyfriends. When I graduated from grade school at the age of thirteen, I was chosen as the speaker from our school. It was a silly poem, but how true.

   So, of course, the next fall I walked the three miles to and from high school, rain or shine. I had a wonderful man teacher for my one year of high school and our class consisted of boys and girls I had known all my life.
   The following year there was a new teacher who taught us Evolution. I'll never forget the day he told the class we had originated from the African monkey, the only difference was "we had lost our tails a long time age." Parents were ready to run him out. He never came the next year.
   The following winter my mother and brother insisted I should go away to school for a few months as I very much wanted to teach. so a friend and I were sent to Elberfeld, Indiana to school. The friend's father ran the grocery store where my mother traded and we two girls had gone to school together so we roomed together--also took some subjects in school together.
   Our history teacher, Miss Bishop, kept six of us girls and four young men students. Each took their turn doing chores, boys building fires, carrying in coal, emptying ashes, chopping kindling and so on, while girls took turns cooking meals, washing dishes, cleaning house and doing the laundry. Each student paid a small sum in cash each week--that bought the vegetables and meat. We had fun doing all three things and living like a large family.
   While there, I learned to play basketball. I had always played ordinary ball during grade and high school.
   I remember when Bryan and McKinley were running for president, the Bryan's played against the McKinley's and got beat.
   I guess I was never a very good conversationalist. When I came home from school, a young man I had grown up with made this remark, "I don't know what else Gertrude learned away at school, but she did learn how to talk."
   I read everything I could lay my hands on. Uncle Rome Burleson was a reader and he let me read all the books he owned.
   Brother George had hired out to a young farmer for twenty dollars a month and his board. As these young people had two babies, they needed help in the kitchen, so I worked for them for eight weeks at two dollars a week doing housework and washing on the board. Water was heated in a big iron kettle out in the yard. Oh, those washings! -- those babies had two outfits each day and the ironing! -- irons heated on oil stove. I managed to stay eight weeks. I needed that sixteen dollars very badly as I planned on taking teacher's exam in August and had promise of a school if I passed. I had been bitten by fleas, (they never bothered brother George, but they did me). I also lost my boyfriend to my cousin because I was never free to go just any time. I felt pretty blue as he had been my sweetheart for two whole years, but you have to sacrifice some things to reach your goal. On the day of the examination, Uncle Rome Burleson came by and picked me up to go to the courthouse in Mt. Vernon.
   I passed that examination. To me, it was the hardest test I ever took in school work. Then, just before school started, my mother had a heart attack and again I gave up what I had worked for, but I never regretted caring for my mother. She had worked hard all my life for me and there was no one one else to do what she needed to regain her health.
[to be continued]