Annie Moore

What does war do to a family? In her 98-year lifetime, Annie Marshall Moore didn't ponder that question. Instead, she lived it. World War I changed her husband forever, and World War II wrought similar changes in the man with whom Annie's volatile younger daughter fell in love. Yet those wars were only two seasons in her life, which started before the first flight of the Wright brothers and ended decades after the first moon landing. At 19 she abandoned a budding career that she loved-a career which made her unusual, indeed, for a young woman of her generation-and returned home to nurse her parents and siblings through a deadly pandemic. At 21, she proudly voted in the first election that allowed American women to do so. She kept her young family warm and fed through the years of the Great Depression, and sent a daughter off to college in 1941-long before that became common, and at a time when it posed huge challenges. Did these things, and all that came after them, make her extraordinary? Not at all. Many "Annie Moores" lived along Maine's coast during the twentieth century. This is the fact-based story of one.