Kith & Kin

Weston Wills and Lorena Oretha (aka “Buddy”) Skaggs , my paternal grandparents, lived in Edmond, an unincorporated community southeast of Charleston, West Virginia. Grandpa was a godly man, not without a sense of humor, and he was born on August 29, 1901. In another blog post I referred to my Grandpa Skaggs’s “tough, rangy body battered by years of hard labor in the West Virginia coal mines.” That’s actually a pretty good description. He was tall and thin and bony. He had had a hard life, as many men did in those days, working in the coal mines at a job that risked his life every day. Somewhere along the way he lost his entire pinky finger and part of his index finger on his right hand. He ended up with black lung and cancer (which resulted in the removal of one of his eyes), so the mines really did eventually kill him. Grandpa worked for seven different coal companies between 1928 and 1960. Imagine working a job where you breathe in black carbon powder every day all day long, down...

Her voice was ever soft, Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman. William Shakespeare,  King Lear , Act 5, Scene 3 Her face was round and soft and wrinkled, the way a grandmother’s face should be. She had a warm smile and a quiet laugh. Her full name was Lorena Oretha Gill Skaggs, but we all called her “Buddy.” She was born in 1905 in Fayette County, West Virginia, and she died seventy-three years later in Fayette County, West Virginia. She was mother to four children but gave birth to only one. She was of small stature and somewhat shy, but she had an inner strength that allowed her to placidly take things as they came, responding with a quiet, “Well . . .” She married my paternal grandfather, Weston Wills Skaggs, in 1936, and they remained married until her death. She was Weston’s second wife. Eva Grace Holliday Skaggs Weston’s first wife, my paternal grandmother, was Eva Grace Holliday, who was born on July 11, 1906. According to one of her cousins, “Eva was a ...