More Than JUST a Maternity Home

Recently I posted about the maternity home my grandmother ran in St. Vincent from the early 1940's to the end of the 1950's, filling a specific healthcare need in my hometown and the surrounding area at a time it was needed.

My grandmother was an entrepreneurial woman. She only had a third grade education, came from a poor family with definite dysfunctional aspects, but she rose above them to her great credit. One of the many ideas she hatched was the maternity home, of which I wrote recently.

My first cousin Delphine (another granddaughter, daughter of my Aunt Pat) told me this afterwards, which I did not know before...

BTW even tho grandma had a maternity home she did have other patients as well. Whenever the Emerson hospital got full Grandma would get some of the overflow. She was taking care of an elderly couple one time that I served meals to when we were there and one time she had a lady that had snow blindness and eyes were swollen shut so she couldn't see so grandma had me sit with her to help her get her food on the fork. So although basically a maternity home it wasn't all for maternity.

The little towns in the St. Vincent area were lucky to have her at that time; more than one would come up years later when I was a little girl and tell my mother how much they had appreciated Grandma's care...