Anna Janett (Anderson) Kelso

She was the eldest of the six Anderson children — born in May 1862, when the American Civil War was just over a year old and the Seven Days Battles were a month away. Her father Rev. Abraham was thirty; her mother Nancy Jane had been married to him less than two years (they married 11 October 1860). The household into which Anna Janett arrived was a Presbyterian minister’s family in Washington County, Pennsylvania — a stretch of rolling country south and west of Pittsburgh that had been settled by Scots-Irish Presbyterian families a century before, and that supplied the western-Pennsylvania Presbyterian church its ministry through generation after generation. Her father preached at Venice, the small Washington-County village where she would be married thirty years later and where the Anderson family graves are kept to the present.

The Kelso marriage

On 28 October 1891 at Venice, Washington County, Anna Janett married William Wallace Kelso Sr. (b. 26 February 1856 Washington PA, d. 10 January 1927 Pennsylvania, buried McDonald, Washington County). He was six years older than she was, almost certainly the son of one of the same Washington-County Presbyterian families that surrounded the Anderson manse. The marriage took place in her father’s own village; the minister-of-record was almost certainly her father.

The “Sr.” in William Kelso’s name implies a William Wallace Kelso Jr. — a son carrying his father’s name. Whether Junior was Anna’s child is queued for follow-up against the Allegheny-and-Washington County vital records of the 1890s and 1900s. The McDonald, Pennsylvania burial place fits the geography of the Kelso family generally.

The long widowhood

William Kelso died 10 January 1927 at age 70. Anna was 64. She lived another twenty-two years in Pennsylvania, dying in 1949 at age 87 — the same year Margaret Florence, her younger sister, last appears in documentary records. She was buried at Venice Cemetery, McDonald, Washington County — back at the cemetery near the village where her father had preached and where she had been married fifty-eight years earlier.

In the family record

Anna Janett does not appear by name in the 1894 letter Rev. Anderson wrote to her sister Margaret Florence — by then Anna had been married to William Kelso for two and a half years and was running her own household. But the letter’s mention of “Marie” — exercised about whether to attend the W.M. Society meeting at Thomas Station to show her new dress — would have been a sister Anna had grown up with. The Mary who was finishing the day’s washing and scrubbing in the same paragraph may have been a household helper or Mary Belle the unmarried sister still at home in 1894.

She is Chuck’s great-great-aunt on the paternal side — sister of his great-grandmother Alice Gertrude.

Sources: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Anna Janett Anderson (K4TB-6M5); the 1894 Rev. Anderson letter for family context.