Flora Ann Margaret Leonard

  General Notes:

Flora, or as we called her Gammie, was a quiet woman but loved to talk to people. She was a homebody and liked to take care of her home, especially the perennial flower gardens that surrounded her small backyard at 443 North Pennsylvania Avenue in Greensburg. They weren't hybrids or exotic flowers - just normal, everyday flowers such as phlox, daisies, poppies, black-eyed Susans, and bright red roses climbing the trellis over the garage. She nurtured them by weeding, watering, and fertilizing them with small cut potato or carrot peelings from yesterday's leftover vegetables. At the end of each day, she would sit on her swing on her back porch and look at her flowers. When anyone came to visit, she would always ask them to look at her flower garden. "Come, look at my flowers! Oh, but you should have been here last week. They were really nice last week."
She spent hours reading her Bible which shows her handwriting, noting the date she started to read the Bible and the date she finished. One Bible was completely read through 17 times. She read her Bible, loved her Bible, and lived by her Bible.
Some of the meals we ate at her home were roast chicken, stuffing, noodles, mashed potatoes, warm German potato salad, and hot slaw.
The death of two of her children left her devastated. Her son, Robert Alton, died at the age of 21 of a melanoma. Then in October, 1965, her only daughter, Ruth Naomi, died of Hodgins Lymphoma at the age of 51. Both of those deaths left her devastated and almost a recluse from 1965 until she died in 1980.

Flora married John Bushyager Soles, son of Herman P. Soles and Minerva Jane Steiner, on 12 Sep 1911. (John Bushyager Soles was born on 10 Jan 1884 in Penn Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylania, died on 26 May 1948 and was buried on 29 May 1948 in Jeannette Memorial Cemetery, PA.)