Catherine McKensie migrated from Ontario, Canada,  to the U.S. when she was 5 years old.  Her parents were Jewish cousins who fell in love and migrated to America.  Catherine was one of five children, having three brothers named Andrew, Archie, and James, and a sister named Mary Jane.  It is not known how Catherine spent her childhood, or where she was living when she met Frank, but in 1937 my parents and my dad's parents traveled to Kansas City and visited with some of the McKensies still living                   there.     One  of   the  things

that they saw was a sod shanty where someone had homesteaded years earlier.  When Frank and Catherine started out their life in Olmsted County, they built a log cabin by hand, with Archie's help.

            It is pretty definite that Frank was a bit on the wild side in his younger years.  Everybody that knew him described him in such terms.  And there is no question that he consumed large quantities of alcohol.  He also became rather unpleasant to be around when he had been drinking.  Catherine knew better than to let him in the house when he came home drunk, for on a few occasions when she had done so, she had suffered physically.  He also loved to argue, and many times he would deliberately try to engage Catherine in some kind of argument or other.  She soon learned to keep quiet and would stand stoically silent in the face of his ranting and raving.

            One night when my grandfather Ben was about  12,  Frank came home drunk and chased the children out of the house.  Ben and his brother John had their own rifles which they used to hunt rabbits and prairie chickens, and they grabbed these as they ran from the house.  It seems that they hid in the potato patch, but Frank was determined to find them, and he began to search with a lantern.  At that point, one of the boys shot out the lantern with a rifle, and that stopped the search.

Benjamin Franklin Erwin