Mother: Goff, America Alice (Lafever) - F 1891/07/17
Date of birth: 1922/03/14
Date of death: 1994/09/18
Spouse: Bristow, Jesse Willard - M 1920/03/10 - 1942/04/27 to ----/--/-- - Married in Albany, KY while Jesse was AWOL from WW II.
Nora Lafever and her twin sister, Dora, had six older brothers and sisters and four who where younger than them. It was difficult living on a Tennessee farm in the middle of the great depression. Nora's older brothers, Charlie and Herschel, had gone to Indiana to find work and ended up as farm hands for a farmer named Weaver. When Mr. Weaver needed a housekeeper they suggested their younger sister, Nora, and sent for her to come to Indiana. This was 1937 and Nora was fifteen years old. By the time she was twenty she had worked as a housekeeper for the Weavers and a nannie for Madge Reid, a school teacher in Richmond who had two children, and then worked at Perfect Circle making piston rings. By then her older sisters, Myrtle and Ada, were married and Ada and her husband, Amon, were living in Michigan and Myrtle and her husband, Hose, lived on a farm in southern Tennessee. Her sisters, Dora and Lorene, had also come North looking for work. Lorene stayed with Nora for a while and worked with her at Perfect Circle. Then Lorene moved on to Michigan and probably stayed with Ada and worked there. Eventually she married and moved back to Tennessee to live on a farm with her husband, Claborn, and work in a garment factory. In 1942 both Nora and Dora married. In 1943 Ada had returned from Michigan to her and Amon's small farm in Tennessee and Nora's new husband, Jesse, had been sent overseas in the Army to fight in the Pacific theatre. Ada was pregnant with her second daughter so Nora stayed with her for a while on the farm to help out. By 1944 Ada had her baby and Amon returned to Tennessee to live for a while on the farm. Nora returned to Richmond, Indiana and worked at Belden making wire and when Jesse's unit was returned to the states temporarily to an army base in Spokane Washington, she and another army wife drove a 1939 Buick she had purchased from Indiana to Washington where they stayed for a week or two with their husbands. In early 1945 the war was over and Jesse returned to Richmond to work at Belden with Nora. In 1947 Nora had her first child, a son she named Roy Duane. Later that year her brother, Kenneth, returned from his Army duty in the occupation of Germany and came to Richmond looking for factory work. He stayed with Jesse and Nora and the new baby at first but soon bought an apartment house and moved into the attic of it so he could rent out all four apartments. In 1949 Jesse's grandfather, Dr. Samuel W. Bristow, sold Jesse a farm near Albany in southern Kentucky and asked him to move there to help take care of him and his wife, Jesse's grandmother, Ellen, as they aged. So Jesse and Nora, who was again pregnant, and their son moved to Albany and stayed with the doctor and his wife while they built a house on the farm where they could live. In January 1950 they had moved into the house on the farm and Nora gave birth there to a daughter, Karen. During or after the birth she had a seizure and she continued having occasional seizures for the next thirty years. Eventually she was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. By the early 1970s she was unable to walk and had to use a wheel chair for the rest of her life. She worked hard with Jesse on the farm as long as she could. In 1975 Jesse died from lung cancer and Karen, who had been teaching school in eastern Kentucky, returned to the farm to care for her mother. In 1979 Duane who was a forester returned to the farm and built a house there and Karen married and left. By the late 1980s, Nora had to go to a nursing home and eventually due to diabetes, both legs were amputated. She died in a nursing home near Cookeville, Tennessee in 1994.
Duane Bristow (duane@kyphilom.com)
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Last revised 2017/01/14.