One Leaf at a Time

When I was about thirteen years old, my mother--Lois Adelaide Hanchett Harper--told me that when she was my age she was shocked to learn that her father, George Draper Hanchett, had been married for the first time, not to her mother (Georgia Elizabeth Thompson Hanchett), but to his first cousin, Blanche Eugenia Draper. "It wasn't that it was a big secret or anything like that," Mom told me. "Everyone knew." By everyone, my mother meant all four of her siblings (Ruth, Margery, George, and Dana), all of them much older than she. As Mom put it, "No one had ever thought to tell me."   George Draper Hanchett, a dairy farmer, married Blanche in August 1906, when he was 23 years old, and she two months shy of her 27th birthday. By December of that year, Blanche was very ill with tuberculosis, which most seriously affected her heart. She died 23 April 1907, a little over eight months after she and George wed. Her death certificate states that her doctor, Charl