Here is a tidbit about Filindia Burnett and her family.

Mary Randall never went to school, she could neither read nor write.

My mom and dad (Gilead & Filindia) had very little education (3d or 4th grade) in a country school.

Grandma Kessinger (Mary Randall) lived 101 years and died in 1935.

Born in Kentucky. When she was young (~12) she was lifted over a fence with her little bundle of clothes and told to shift for herself. She become a ward of a family named Pepper. A hard childhood followed.

She married a man named Brown. He was killed in the Civil War. Two children, both boys. Then she married Levi Burnett. Two children, Annette and Filindia (my mother). Your Grandma Comer was born after her father died. (Mom was born March 30, 1876 - October 22, 1948 of a broken hip and other complications). Her mother survived a broken hip at 90 and lived eleven years longer.

Levi Burnett and his partner ran a country newspaper. It is said that they had a cedar bucket of gold coins under the flood in the print shop. Levi died and his partner skipped off to Europe and was never heard from again.

Mom and Aunt Net (Annette) and Grandma got $100 a piece for the sale of the print shop. Then Grandma married W. S. Kessenger - a hard shell Baptist preacher who worked a rural mail route. Two boys, Tom and Walter by him. Grandma raised three families of her own 14 kids - 6 her own and 8 others.

(Edward Lee Comer's handwritten memoirs transcribed by Rowan Fairgrove)

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