Cephas Adolph Eisenman, Lifelong Minnesotan

Fillmore County, Minnesota

Imagine a clear blue sky and a temperature outside barely above zero on Thursday, 17 December 1874.  Inside the farmhouse, a nervous father-to-be only hears the crackles from the fire in the hearth – and then the cry of a newborn baby in the next room.  His first child, my great-grandfather, Cephas Adolph Eisenman was born on this day.  I don’t really know what the day was like or what time he was born but I can pretend....

Ethel May Kendall Hibsch, My First Family Historian

Ethel May Kendall, 1917

Covina High School Graduation

Sometime on 22 May 1899, likely in their two-story wood-framed house in Los Nietos, California, Henry Martin Kendall and his wife Ida May Brown welcomed a baby girl they named Ethel May.  My Grandma.  Baby Ethel joined siblings Charles, Celia, Henry and Joseph.  Another brother, Thomas Arley, would arrive in a couple years. She lived in Los Nietos for several years until the family relocated to Baldwin Park, Los Angeles County, California in the San Gabriel Valley.  There, she was surrounded by the rich soil where citrus orchards were abundant, like on her father's ranch.....