FAMILY

Gladys Marie Boring was the youngest of four surviving sisters; a fifth, Grace Bernice, born half-dozen years after her, did not reach her first birthday. The oldest, Florence Emma, died a few years before I met the family, but I knew Maude May, the next in line, quite well. The third, Inez Louise, I met only once, during the same trip to Kansas City, Kansas, in the summer of 1954, when I visited with Gladys’ parents for the only time. Gladys was born on September 7, 1901.

Little more is known about the background of her mother, Viola Hill, than that she was born in Devon, Kansas and married James H. Boring in Fort Scott, Kansas on December 19, 1894. Gladys often told me that her mother had no middle name and her father refused to divulge his.

His father, David William Boring, was from Kentucky and served with the Union Army during the Civil War.

Emma Jane Chasteen, his mother, was born in Nevada, Missouri, a town that figured in his later life–and whose name was always pronounced “Ne vay' da” by Gladys.

Emma had two younger sisters, Mary Delila and Martha Alice, both of whom died as children; their parents, Nancy Ann Locke and John Chasteen, were married on March 21, 1844.

James had a younger sister, Sarah Ann, but little more than a year after her birth their mother died, and their Grandmother Chasteen raised them. Subsequently their father remarried and had two daughters who lived to maturity. When asked to verify that her father and aunt had indeed been raised by their grandmother, Gladys responded quickly and emphatically, “Well, what little upbringing they got, yes.” Gladys recalled visiting her Aunt Sarah in San Francisco, perhaps as early as 1936, where the latter had become a prominent Christian Science lay reader and lived in a row house; she had a daughter, Christine. “The only time I saw my dad’s relatives.”

On her mother’s side Gladys recalled an Aunt Minnie, whose daughter came to Seattle many years later to see the then new Mormon Temple at nearby Eastgate and to visit the Ratcliffes. An active Mormon, she had assembled considerable information on the Borings, but Gladys recalled no further contact with her. Viola had another sister, Gertie, and several brothers, of whom Gladys remembered only John.