Edna Hymas and Her Parents/Our Grandparents

Edna Hymas Eborn was born November 8, 1912 in Liberty, Idaho.   At this writing she would be approaching her 97th birthday.  She was the sixteenth child of Benjamin Pitman Hymas and Elizabeth Price.  The picture below is of Edna's parents, our grandparents, on the Hymas side of the family and as I remember Mother telling me about this picture, it was taken at about the time of their marraige.  As you can see from the picture they made a good-looking couple.  I reget not having any pictures of mother as a baby or a young child, but we must remember that cameras were not owned by very many people in the Bear Lake Valley at the time and most pictures were taken by local professional photographers.  Their equipment was primitive by our modern standards, but as you can see from the picture of Grandma Elizabeth Price Hymas and her handsome, young husband, Benjamin Pitman Hymas, these rural photagraphers did an excellent job and we are left with some photographs of excellent quality.  I count each one as a treasure.

Below are the pictures that Grandma Edna had in her Book of Remembrance.  There may be others, but  if there are I don't know where they are or who has them,

The above picture, if the names on the back of the photograph are correct, are from left to right, Edna, our mother and grandmother, Aunt June, Aunt Ruby, a cousin Pearl Hymas and the youngest in the family, Uncle Rayo.  If this is the case, then this may be the earliest known picture of Edna Hymas, our mother and grandmother. I'm not sure of her age at the time,but assume she was a young teenager.  It was taken in front of the Hymas family home, which still stands on the hill in Liberty, Idaho.  It is just across the road from the large, white barn with the painted Holstein cow on the south end of it, which is easily seen from the main road passing through Liberty, just north and a little west of the Liberty Ward Church.

As a young woman, mother used to love to ride horses as you can see from the picture below. She said she was often given the assignment of herding the cows in the Dell west of Liberty. I think she rather enjoyed it.

The picture  below is of Edna's mother, Elizabeth Price Hymas.  Mother said she had no true recollection of her real mother, as she died about one and a half years after mother was born, shortly after giving birth to the seventeenth child in the family, Uncle Calvin.  She was forty-three years old at the time and had given birth to three sets of twins.  Not all of the children survrvived her, as some died in early childhood, including one of the sets of twins, Leo and Alonzo.  This left Grandpa Hymas in desparate straits, a widower, with a very large family and very much work to do in the home and on the farm.  I remember mother telling of how Aunt Bertha, the oldest living child, took on the reponsibility of caring for the home and family.  About two years after Grandma Lizzie, as she was affectionatly know, died, Grandpa Benjamin took a new wife, Martha Derricott, who bore the last three children in the family Eldon, Ruby and Rayo,making a total of twenty. Martha was about the same age as Aunt Bertha and this caused some conflict.  Of course not all of the children lived to maturity, but it was nontheless a very large and busy family.  Grandpa Hymas aquired a rather large holding of land and made sure the boys and girls alike had plenty to do on the farm.  They milked cows, raised, pigs, chickens and beef cattle, raised hay and grain, had a large garden, and operated a community cheese factory, using the milk produced by their own dairy cows and also buying excess milk from many of the neighbors around the area.  In spite of the large family, and maybe because of it, they seemed to prosper, maybe even more than most of their neighbors. The family cheese business was the source of most of their money.

Elizabeth Price Hymas was a daughter of Robert Price and one of his polygomous wives, Susannah Juchau. She was born and raised in Paris, Idaho.  At her death , at age 43, she was buried in the Liberty, Idaho cemetery. This is Edna's mother, our grand-mother and great-grand-mother.

by Bart