Nicholas Aloysius "Nick" Peine
Notes:
Nick was a farmer all his working life. He and his wife Marion operated the family farm a little east of Miesville, MN, until their retirement to the nearby town of Hastings, MN. Nick died of Altzheimer's Desease in his home at 3130 Cory Lane, Apt 104, Hastings, MN at 9:30AM, aged 93 years, one month and 9 days, in attendance by his daughters Linda and Maureen.
Notes:
Carol (Peine) Raleigh writes this about her mother:I visited the gravesite of my mother's grandparents and great grandparents recently in RedWing, MN.
Anna Toner emigrated with four of her siblings during the potato famine. She married Thomas O'Keefe and they had four children: Mary Gertrude (my grandmother), Nellie, Dorothy (Dora) and Fred. Thomas died when my grandmother was 8 years old. The latter two children died in early adulthood, but Nellie lived into her nineties and Mary Gertrude died at age 76 from a car accident.
Anna is buried with her husband Thomas' family. Thomas' father was Joseph O'Keefe and he emigrated from Ireland. These graves are in Calvary Cemetery in Red Wing. My mother also showed me the house where she and her mother (Mary Gertrude) were born. Approaching the house, she said "We used to go sledding on this hill." This is in Burnside, an area near Red Wing.
My mother and her mother were high school graduates who took the one-year teacher's training course and then taught in one-room schoolhouses before their marriages. My mother is still very active and alert, approaching her 87th birthday in October. She reads voraciously, has an excellent memory and is active in several card groups. She plays bridge with a group of women who were young mothers when they started and are now all great-grandmothers. In 2004 she endured the death of my father (at 93) and cancer. She had surgery and chemotherapy, and now has curly hair!
She never missed a party during chemo, would get dressed up and go, even if she didn't feel very good. She still plays golf with her friends, entertains frequently and is a "clothes horse". Just this year, she stopped picking her own strawberries at the local farm---she bought them, but still made jam. She is going on a bus trip to Nova Scotia this summer with the senior center group. This amazing Toner ancestor is Marion Miller Peine, my mother.
Notes:
Norman was born on a farm in Itawamba County outside of Mooresville where his father worked as a sharecropper. He attended school only as far as the third grade when he went to work tending (not driving) oxen for a logging operation which was cutting trees in the Tupelo area and transporting them by oxen to pulp mills on the Gulf Coast. In a couple of years his brother Alvin was working as an oxen driver while Norman graduated to driving a Model-T dump truck around the age of 14. In his early twenties, Norman became a bartender at the "Top Hat" which was a prohibition speakeasy in east Tupelo and later a well known bar for many years. Norman left this job for work in the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) camps during the recovery years following the Great Depression. It was here that he learned the trade of carpentry. Around this time he met and married Etoile and they had their first child, "Jean", two years later.
Norman's carpentry skill plus the influence of his mother's brother, Robert Quinton Mansell, got him employed by the Leake and Goodlett Lumber Company building houses. "Uncle Quint" and his brother Verdo were foremen for Leake and Goodlett, each running separate house building crews. Norman sometimes worked on Quint's crew and sometimes on Verdo's, and regularly attended the Wednesday night men's bible study classes taught by Quint at the Priceville Baptist Church (otherwise known as a "regular Christian church" here in the deep South).
During the years of the Second World War, Norman and Etoile both worked for the Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Etoile worked as one of the hundreds of women of this era collectively known as "Rosie the Riviter". After the war they returned to the Tupelo area where Norman again worked with Leake and Goodlett and where his skilled developed into an "inside carpenter", the one who does the cabinetry, doors and molding work. During this time they lived in a succession of tiny towns near Tupelo from which Norman commuted, but for the period from 1952 until about 1960 they lived at 323 Maple Street in Tupelo.
Upon the death of Norman's father they removed to Norman's boyhood home on Feemster Lake Road in East Tupelo. It was here that Norman and Etoile lived out their days during which they acquired two additional properties. One of these they eventually deeded to their son Donald and the other to their son Gerald. The home place was deeded by Norman to their daughter Jean with Etoile being given "life estate", i.e., the right to occupy the property until her death. The verbal condition of this gift was that the property eventually become the inheritance of Jean's children, a condition fulfilled by her husband, Lynn, after Jean's death. Norman was SSN 427-09-3595.
Although Norman was a heavy drinker as a young man and his character suffered from that in those years, by the time he was forty he had broken the habit and his true nature then came out. He was a gentle man who would never turn anyone down who needed his help. Always willing to give away or share whatever he had, he was a man with many friends. He loved animals and was unfailingly kind to them, and he was a tolerant man for people of all colors and persuasions.
Notes:
Etoile married her first husband, Bera Walls, at the age of only 14 yrs. Exactly when the marriage was ended is not known but according to her sister Opal "...it didn't last long." A few years after Norman's death she invited one Lyderal D. Parker, an elderly man, to stay with her. He died October 19, 2002 and it was stated in his obituary that he was survived by his "special friend" Alma [Etoile] Tackett so we might assume that they never married. Etoile's was SSN 410-32-2358.
Notes:
Etoile married her first husband, Bera Walls, at the age of only 14 yrs. Exactly when the marriage was ended is not known but according to her sister Opal "...it didn't last long." A few years after Norman's death she invited one Lyderal D. Parker, an elderly man, to stay with her. He died October 19, 2002 and it was stated in his obituary that he was survived by his "special friend" Alma [Etoile] Tackett so we might assume that they never married. Etoile's was SSN 410-32-2358.
Notes:
The obituary of Clyde Ray reports that he was survived by seven siblings, Mrs. Howard Flaherty, Mrs. Lerome Bray, Mrs. Betty Renolds, Mrs. Hattie Jumper, Mrs. Levell Rucker, Mr. Earl Ray and Mr. Fletcher Ray.Ran away at 17 and stayed with uncle in texas because step mother was mean an made grandfathter whip them.
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Cora wrote her name "Cora O." but when asked her middle name, some people heard her to say "Lena", possibly a misunderstanding of "Olena" as "Oh, Lena". At any rate, her name is to be found both ways.
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Her name is spelled "Margeret" on her gravestone but this is believed by the family to be a mispelling.
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Frank and Gert loved to organize an summer holiday extended-family picnics at a Hastings, MN park. Frank continued the practice after Gert died. At what was to be the last of these, Frank fell and broke his hip, then to die as the result of a post operative embolism.