During this period of time, he had met and later married our mother, Hiter Higbee, who was born in 1880 near Winchester, Missouri.
Mother’s birth place is only a few miles from St. Patrick, Missouri, where it is said hundreds of letters are sent annually to be post marked “St. Patrick, March 17”. We usually pay St. Patrick a visit when we go South to visit our rela- tives. At the present a combined store and post office, a school, a beautiful Catholic Church constructed of stone shipped from Ireland, and approximately a dozen dwellings are all that remain of the larger community that existed years ago. ~
The Barkley family consisted of Dad, Mother, Andrew, Merle and sister Mabel. Our childhood days for the most part, were happy ones. One of our first lessons for survival was to watch out for snakes and I have seen my Mother dis— . pose of many a rattler with her trusty garden hoe.
Thunder storms during the summer some times were fierce. I remember Mother getting up at night and lighting a lamp and pulling down the window shades. i suppose it was a combination of long hot summers, storms, and shor- tage of farming land that caused Dad to become discontented and gave him the desire to move North where land was more plentiful and the climate was cooler. As he had suffered a sun stroke as a boy, the hot weather did not agree with him.
He had made a number of trips North during the summers to Minnesota. North Dakota and Manitoba, and he liked what he saw in the Red River Valley especially in Manitoba. However, Mother said that we’d likely all freeze coming
LH. Barkley, 1905. Mabel, Merle. Mrs. Barkiey, Andrew, 1939.
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