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52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks no. 8—Anna Petronellia Sherman (1865-1961)

Anna Petronellia Sherman lived a very long life. According to death certificate information provided by her son Thomas Aaron Reed, she was born on April 1, 1865 to Thomas Sherman and Catherine Stanabaugh and died in Clinton, Missouri in 1961 at the age of 95. Contrary to the information on her death certificate, she was probably born in Indiana. No record of her mother has been found, and family lore claims that she died in Indiana before 1870. The mother was reportedly from Germany or Holland, making little Petronellia either half German or half Dutch.

The motherless girl strongly disapproved when her father remarried 19-year-old Alice Farris in 1881. Ironic then, that two years later on September 6, 1883 Petronellia herself, at the age of 18, married an older widower, 38-year-old Samuel Harvey Reed, in Coles County, Illinois. She became the stepmother to his two daughters, Annie and Clara. He called her “Pet” and drove her around in a buggy while she held a fancy parasol. She later said she was attracted to his big, white house (which actually belonged to his father) and to the highly-respected Reed name. The Reeds, in turn, hardly approved of Samuel marrying the daughter of a poor blacksmith who drank, especially when Samuel’s first wife had been very well off. Samuel immediately moved his new bride to Kansas and later, to Missouri. They had seven children: Bertha Evaline (1884), Caleb Logan (1887), Viola May (1889), Robert Morton (1891), Samuel Carter (1892), Thomas Aaron (1894), and Owen Herbert (1896 or 1897).

People who knew Petronellia have described her as temperamental, religious, and hard-working. Sometimes she kept a perfect house; at others she allowed chickens indoors. One time she chopped down all the trees in her yard because the songbirds annoyed her early in the morning. She had a fiery temper and could not get along with others. She and Samuel divorced in 1904.

She joined the No. 1 Methodist Church in Mountain Grove, Missouri when she was 23 and remained a member for the next 73 years. She read the Bible completely more than 20 times, played the church organ, and taught Sunday School until she was in her 90’s. She lived a simple, frugal life without an indoor toilet. If her children tried to give her money, she would donate it to Boy’s Town in Nebraska.

Petronellia worked for the Post Office off and on. She met Samuel Reed while working at the Charleston, Illinois post office. She was the first Postmaster at Graff, Missouri, serving from 1895 to 1899.

After her divorce from Samuel Reed, she married Captain James W. Coffey, a Confederate veteran of the Civil War, in 1906 in Texas County, Missouri. Some of her sons worked on Coffey’s farm. The marriage lasted only a few years and ended in divorce. With her children grown and no husband, Petronellia needed to earn a living.

She resumed the Reed surname and decided to apply for a homestead. Selling a proved-up homestead was a good way for single women to build a nest egg. To do so, she needed to move to a public-land state with homesteads available.

Several of her younger children had relocated to the Nebraska-Wyoming area, and her son Robert Morton Reed was the railroad station agent at Farthing, Wyoming, near Iron Mountain in Laramie County northwest of Cheyenne. Petronellia joined him there and took up a stock-raising homestead in 1918. She raised chickens and a few head of cattle, and she tried to grow some crops, without much success. One year, she harvested only a bucketful of potatoes. She became a crack-shot antelope hunter to survive.

By the end of her five-year homestead term, her son’s family had moved on to Wheatland, Wyoming with his railroad job. Petronellia hated the cold, windy, treeless prairie, so she sold her homestead and moved alone back to Missouri. Her homestead is now part of the large Farthing Ranch.

She lived out the rest of her long life in Mountain Grove, Missouri, growing blind in old age and eventually moving into a nursing home the last year of her life. She is buried in the churchyard of the No. 1 Methodist Church. She lies next to the grave of her daughter Bertha’s unnamed stillborn daughter who had been laid to rest there over 50 years earlier, in 1909.



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