My father's sister Alma was the second eldest of Mama and Manning Atwood's children that lived. She lived in Comanche, Texas all of her life. She was very smart and attended Texas Wesleyan College in Fort Worth for two years.
She taught school in Comanche before she married Harold Denny in 1926. She and Uncle Harold had one child, Cleve B. Denny; he is shown as an infant in the photo with his mother. In the large family photo from Christmas she is on the far right, standing.
Aunt Alma was particularly active in the Comanche Garden Club and became a judge for flower shows. She researched and wrote a genealogical survey of the George Atwood descendants including Manning Atwood's family. This project took many years and she traveled extensively gathering data and meeting other relatives through the years. Every one of her generation of the Atwoods and their children all have copies of her book.
Aunt Alma was an amazing housekeeper. Not only was her house always clean and tidy but it always smelled fresh. She and Uncle Harold always had a big vegetable garden behind their house and grew their own vegetables and fruit. They had pecan, peach and apricot trees as well. She grew roses that were absolutely beautiful. Late in their lives, when her sister Aunt Ernestine was in the hospital I remember she cut her most beautiful rose from beside her back door to take to Ernestine that day.
The guest bedroom in their house was the one that had been Cleve's room when he was a boy and lived at home. She had a particular picture of a little girl in a rocking chair on the wall in that room. I loved that picture and when I asked her about it she said it was "just a magazine picture" that she had always liked and she had cut it out and put it in a frame.
After she passed away it must have been sold at her estate sale. But in 2010 it turned up in an antique store in Fort Worth still in the same frame. Of course I bought it and now it hangs in my house.
