...time to ring the New Year in, as it is now.

MISSOURI 1889-1895

Her full name was Sarah Marie Turner. She signed her name S. Marie, but was known by everyone simply as Marie. She was born in 1889 deep in the rural Missouri Ozarks, near the little town of Arno. Her parents were John Jefferson Turner and Matilda Ann Miller. She had an older sister Alpha and four brothers: Willis, Ned, Andy and Walter. Grandfather Andrew Jackson Turner used to share with them all his war battle stories of defending the Confederacy. Grandfather believed so strongly in the Southern Cause that he graced his son John with a middle name to honor the Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis.



In this 1894 photograph along side the Arno school house, five-year old Marie sits at the far left end of the front bench. Her facial features, eyes and slant of her smile, are unmistakable. Willis and Alpha are probably in the group as well, but their identities can only be guessed at based on later photos.

Within the next two years, Alpha and Marie would arrive by train to a new metropolitan lifestyle two thousand miles away: Oregon.