My mother, Alice Elsie Welch Collins, is ninety-eight years old. She is now in the nursing care of hospice in the Memphis, Tennessee area. We expect her to leave us any day.
Mom was born August 22, 1919 in Grand Parish, Louisiana, the tenth child of John Ira (John) and Ardella (Della) Waits Welch. She was living in Monticello, LA at the time of the disaster known as the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The river reached a width of sixty miles. Her father died in August 1933 when she was just fourteen. The family broke apart, and she moved to Memphis to live with relatives. That is where she met and eventually married my dad, Marion Collins, in 1937.
With mom’s help, I published her story, My Journey, in 2009. I have attached a downloadable pdf. In My Journey, she wrote the following:
“We shared our home with many folks along the way and always made room for anyone needing a lift in life. The Lord gets the praise for the blessings he has given us…The Journey has been a long one and although we have had a few bumps along the way, we made it and now we are almost there.”
She will be greatly missed, but her journey will not end. It will go on through her four children, thirteen grandchildren, twenty-two great grandchildren, many nephews, nieces, and others whose life she touched.
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For signed copies of books by Tom Collins, go to the TomCollinsAuthor.com. Unsigned print and eBook editions are available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online bookstores. For Amazon go to www.amazon.com/Tom-Collins. For an audio edition of The Claret Murders go to http://amzn.com/B00IV5ZJEI. eBook editions are also available through Apple iTunes’ iBook’s Store and Smashwords.com. For the new adventure novel on Amazon go to Diversion, A Mark Rollins Adventure
Published by I-65 North, Inc.