She was nothing like my mother. Yet Bertha was my mother's mother.

Bertha's idea of a snack was Vienna sausages eaten from a can. Bertha adorned her bathroom with toilet paper covers made from crocheted "skirts" and plastic doll heads. Bertha began dinner by beating a chicken with a walking cane. Bertha's weathered face and uncovered legs were tanned from working in her garden.

Momma was blonde and fair and lived in a beautiful two-story colonial-inspired home which hosted many parties with many finger sandwiches to which she wore designer dresses and matching shoes. All the while Bertha and her chickens and her garden were just a few blocks from us. We did not go there often.

Bertha was just sixteen years old when she discovered that she was pregnant. It would have been around her birthday month in March that she knew for sure. At seventeen, she announced that she and Willie T. Bird (1900–1951) would marry. "T" was his full middle name. He went by the name "Tump." They were an odd couple. He was thirty-two. That is twice her age. He was a grown man. He had already been married and divorced. He had a a nine-year-old child named Allene. Bertha was just a girl in high school. They were a peculiar looking pair--not just because she was a girl and he was a grown man in a hat and tie, but because he was so tall and she was so short. Bertha was 5'2. Tump was 6'7 and wore a size thirteen shoe. If you saw those two together, you were going to look twice.

I have found no record that Bertha and Wille T. Bird married in Texas or Louisiana. It is possible that her Granny, who was her guardian, would not sign for such a marriage as she was still a teenager, and so people only thought that they were married. They really needed that perception because on Aug. 26, 1932, Bertha delivered Willene Joan Bird.

However, Willie T. Bird was not the father of Willene Bird.

Momma never knew that. None of us would know that if I had not had the spit test that connected me to a database of DNA matches, of whom his grandchild (daughter of Allene) was clearly not a match with me. Willie T. Bird and I are not related.

That is another story for another time.

We called her Grandma Byrd, but I did not fully understand her relation to us. She and my momma did not seem like mother and daughter. She was just this fascinating, tousle-headed stranger who talked incessantly to herself while driving a big, black and white station wagon. When I find myself talking to myself--as I frequently do--I am reminded that I am indeed the granddaughter of Bertha Cunningham Bird Byrd.

(A Recollection--M.E. McWilliams, her granddaughter)