Individual Details

Marriage

Remembrances of Vinna (Bowers) Helstern, tape-recorded 1989 by Bob Gross
#3 Bushong family "Floy found very little information. Grandpa [Enos Woods]and Grandma [Mary Jane Bushong] Bowers seem to have met in Hancock Co....
My father [Harvey] was the oldest [of Mary Jane Bushong and Enos Bowers’ 7 children]; when he was 17 his mother died, not in childbirth as we thought for a good many years, but of malaria. The territory south of Toledo was once swampland, and gradually it changed. We weren’t surprised, then, that she died of malaria. Somehow the baby was kept alive for about a month but died later"

He never re-married after his wife died, leaving him alone to raise 7 children. He turned the farming over to his 2 oldest sons and became full-time homemaker, baking bread for his family and sewing all their clothes. He got the women of the church to make the buttonholes. When his daughters became young adults, he sent them out to live with church families so they could learn how to cook and keep house properly.

Death

Mary Jane died of malaria at the time her youngest child was born. The child died a few weeks' later. They lived in Hancock County OH, just south of Toledo, an area that had previously been a swamp.
Remembrances of Vinna (Bowers) Helstern, tape-recorded 1989 by Bob Gross
#3 Bushong family Floy found very little information. Grandpa [Enos Woods]and Grandma [Rebecca Bushong] Bowers seem to have met in Hancock Co....
My father [Harvey] was the oldest [of Rebecca Bushong and Enos Bowers’ 7 children]; when he was 17 his mother died, not in childbirth as we thought for a good many years, but of malaria. The territory south of Toledo was once swampland, and gradually it changed. We weren’t surprised, then, that she died of malaria. Somehow the baby was kept alive for about a month but died later