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Memories of Golde Dicks Markham (1996) Golde Markham Dicks 27/125

Ma and Pa lived at Grandma and Grandpa Dicks’s house for some time after they
eloped. Grandpa Tyre wouldn’t let her go back home until sometime after I was bom. Ma

told me he wouldn’t even let her get her clothes. But by this time she had slipped most of her
clothes to Grandma Kennedy’s house.
Whenever Grandpa Tyre went to Lake City, Grandma Tyre sent her son Jess to our

house to tote me over to their home to spend the day while Grandpa was away. It took most
of the day to go by horse to Lake City. In the late afternoon, Jess carried me home.

I can remember the night Great-Grandma Kennedy died.
We were all asleep when Pa shouted, “Pearl!”

Ma answered, “Yes, John. What do you want?”
He said, “Look at that casket over at the foot of our bed.”
She asked in surprise, “Where?”

He said, “It floated away.”
He told her it floated into the room, through the open window and1 over the bed, but
she never saw the casket. We all got so excited we couldn’t go back to sleep, then someone

knocked on the door. Pa went to the door and learned from a neighbor that Frances Kennedy
had died a few minutes ago.
Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa Kennedy, originally from Georgia, lived just

across the branch and around the curve (where my brother Rodney now has a'little farm­
helpers house). At this time their daughter, Mollie, lived with them. She had married a man
everyone called “Joe Pete Dicks.” My great-grandma and great-grandpa had two girls,

Martha Caroline (my Grandma Kennedy Tyre) and Mollie, who is buried somewhere in
Georgia, I think.
They had two or three boys, one named “Henry.” The one Grandma Tyre thought the

most of lived in Plant City and raised his family there. This brother had four children: Ruby,
Vernon, Clarice, and Vera. Ruby, the oldest, never married. Vernon, their only son, has been

dead for years. Vera, their youngest daughter died during childbirth when her son, Robert,
was bom. Robert and his wife have been missionaries for years somewhere in Africa. The
two oldest girls, Ruby and Clarice, were in a rest home in Georgia—the last I heard.
When Great-Grandpa Kennedy got old, he was completely deaf and near blind. He

Eved with us for some time. He sat on the front porch in a rocking chair and talked out loud
to himself. Neighbors rode by on horseback and spoke to him, but he couldn’t hear them.

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