Oliver Family

I imagine little Anna Catherine Oliver, my great-great-grandmother was looking forward to her fifth birthday, as most children do at her age. Instead, she became an orphan just a month before when her beloved mother, Sarah died. Her father John and three siblings were already dead, most likely from diseases that at the time, had no cure. At just five years old, Anna had already witnessed the horrors of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the death of her parents, and by December of 1866, a mere month after her fifth birthday, the death of yet another sibling, her older brother Philip. All that would survive of the John M. Oliver family were Anna, her [...]