This was some of the Welles family. They came at Christmas time because Mom had fixed up some gifts for them.
From left to right, Aunt Lillian, Thelma who was married to Lillian's oldest boy Kenneth Junior whom everybody just called "Junior". Last is Molly. Molly is a very sad story.
There is a reason there is only one photo here.

These are the relatives you really don't want anyone to know you are related to at all. Our connection is tenuous at best or possibly I should say least. Lillian is the half sister of my mother. She was born of a relationship our grandmother had years before she had our mother.
I have always believe that Lillian was never playing with a full deck. Even our mother said it in the early years of her many journals. There is no getting around it and if I want to be truthful, which I do, our Grandmother Julia was a woman of very loose morals. Our Mother said she was the White Sheep of the family and from what I have seen and read she was a thousand times better than her mother or her half sister Lillian or Julia's other sister, our mother's Aunt Anna.
To get back to Lillian. Mom thought she was somewhat retarded. I think it was more like she had no training in what was right or wrong. She definitely had no one to look to for moral guidance. I think Mom at least had friends and coworkers she could look up to for advice or just to follow. Mom loved the movies. She loved books. The characters in these help to make her a better person than those around her, but Lillian had none of that.

She could barely read at all. Lillian and Mom's other sister or half sister in Mom's case was also named Anna. Between Anna and Lillian, Anna got all the smarts and the belief that life didn't have to be the way her own mother lived hers.

After Anna's early death at age 17, their mom went farther away from mental sobriety than she had ever been before. She did anything and everything to forget her daughter's death. This meant there was no guidance for her other daughters but in fact there never had been. My grandmother was a slut. There's no getting around that.
Lillian grew up thinking sex was the way to get things. She was never what one would call in those days a "looker" She was plain.
I don't know how it happened or even why but she married a man named Kenneth Welles. He was also sex crazy and mean and a man with no morals at all. His family were staunch Seventh Day Adventist's. I don't know if that's what made him into the creature he became or if it was some genetic fault. The man was a sleeze ball!. I don't know where that term came from but it fits him to a T. None of us, not Mom, Dad or us kids liked him at all. Even as children we recognized him as pond scum.
In later years and I have no idea how someone could have thought he could fulfill the job, he was given the job or appointed to it as the one who would provide care for stray animals, dogs especially. He was paid to do this job by the local government. This man had on at least one occasion hung every cat they owned and left them in the barn for his children including and especially Molly to see. Still, perhaps because no one ever told the officials this he was allowed the job.

A few years would go by from that time and it would all come out how he starved the animals and left them in their messes with no humane care at all. I'm not telling any secrets. It was in all the papers at the time. Not the early cat part but the animal abuse at the time of his arrest. I don't think he did any time. I really don't know what happened to him.
They had a lot of children as they never practiced birth control other than she told Mom once that Saturday was sacred and there could be no sex from midnight Friday till Midnight Sunday. They couldn't even eat potato chips on Saturday. I remember laughing when we heard that.

From what I have heard and read he did the deed with his children and encouraged them to do it with each other. Of course we knew none of this when we were kids. We just thought they were an odd bunch.
We didn't visit them often. In fact I have no idea why we visited them at all. I think Mom felt sorry for Lillian and tried to show her that life could be different.
She named all of her girls after movie stars or characters. I'm trying to remember all their names. Joan was named for Joan Crawford I think. Pat was named Patricia but I don't know what star that was. There was Molly who was named Marlene, Ellen, I think there was one named Brenda that she named for the comic stip character Brenda Starr but she died soon after birth. The boys were Kenneth Jr, who was always called Junior. Then there was Wayne. I believe Wayne was not named for John Wayne as you think but for something she saw on a fuel pump somewhere when they were filing up with gas. There were Johnny Joey and Jimmy. I'm not sure if any of them were twins or not. I think Johnny and Joey were. There may have been more kids. I just don't remember.
This whole family was crazy, disgusting and sick. Most of the boys served time or were arrested for various things. At least two of the girls tried to kill themselves.
Ellen and one of the boys shared a bedroom. They had separate beds but still we thought even as kids that it was real odd. We didn't learn about all the other stuff till we were adults.
The last time we went to visit them when we were kids the oldest girls were out in the yard lying between the legs of boyfriends. Molly was in the swing out in front beside the cherry bushes. We were pushing her in the swing. She was laughing and said "Don't push me too high. Uncle Quiff might see my panties!"

One day she told us she was going to have a baby and the mailman was the father. We didn't believe her but you never knew for sure if she was telling the truth or not. They had a TV and I'm pretty sure they weren't careful about what anyone watched, unless it was Saturday.

We liked to pick and eat those cherries when we'd go to visit them. We liked the stacks of comic books they gave us when we left. I kind of think the comic books were the only reason Dad even took us there.

The older girls were man crazy. Ellen seemed normal on the surface. She was one of the ones that we heard later on after she was married tried to kill herself.
Mom was disgusted after seeing the girls making out with their men friends in the front yard for any one to see, and made Dad bring us all home. We didn't go back until years later and then only for 15 minutes or so at a time. Mom just couldn't take it and didn't want us exposed to the seedier side of life.

Junior was serving time in prison for setting a neighbors barn and fields on fire. It was deliberate I was told years ago. Someone paid him to do it. In later years the farm that Kenneth and Lillian owned would also burn under suspicious circumstances.

We visited them once after in their new home built on the same land as the old one. Molly was playing with a doll that we had given her some time before the fire. We asked her how she saved her doll and she said the boys put all her dolls in the barn first. They also still had their almost new chest freezer which you know no one is going to pull out of a burning building. She told us that was in barn too. We knew. Nobody said a word. Who would believe it anyway? We had heard these words from someone who was supposed to be retarded.

This was another case of the school system failing. It wasn't that Molly was retarded. It was that the only thing she had ever been taught was nasty stuff. When she was a baby her mother was doing a lot of the barn work. She had to help milk the cows and harvest the crops. She couldn't do that with no one to watch the baby so she fed her paregoric acid to make her sleep. A lot of people used it in olden days for just that reason. Its a wonder it didn't kill her. I don't believe it made her retarded.

When Molly started school, she was scared and under a lot of stress from the way her family had raised her. She wet her pants on a regular basis. The teacher sent her home with a note that they were to keep her home until she was potty trained. She was six or seven years old at the time. Our mother told us all about this. Lillian decided she didn't have the time and it was too much effort. Molly never went back school and no one ever went to the house to force her to do that.

When she was in her twenties I think, we visited them one day and Mom and some of kids got her at a table and taught her how to write her name. She knew it while we were there. She copied it over and over for Mom. A month later we went back and she knew nothing. She couldn't even remember doing it. Mom gave up.

Both Lillian and Kenneth are dead now. I don't know where most of the kids are. One I think is or was serving time for statutory rape. I met one of Pat's daughters a few years back and she seemed normal but she told me she suffered from a mental disorder that made her pull all her hair out. She was wearing a lovely wig at the time.

After Lillian died, Molly was sent to a nursing home. It wasn't that she was old but she wasn't young, for sure. It was because she was diabetic and there was no one at home to take care of her. One of the boys, I think may have been paying the fees or maybe it was some kind of social security thing. Last I heard she was transferred to another home that was paid for by the state. I think she's still alive.

he home is in Granville and Sue sometimes would go visit her but she said all Molly could talk about was who had raped her. It was too much and Sue stopped visiting her. We always felt sorry for her but there was no way we could fix what was wrong with her.

We are eternally grateful that we have not had to live like this.

Our mother raised us to be ladies and some of didn't quite fill that mold but we were never like this hidden branch of our family and I thank God for having the mother I did and not being born into such a demented family as Molly's. As far as I know and for the most part we were virgins when we married. Or at least when we met the man we married.

I found Lillian's Obituary when she died.

I found it odd that they wrote it as though Royal Pease had been married to Julia and the order of the names implies she was married to him AFTER Grandpa Russell when in fact, Julia was NEVER married to Royal Pease because at the time of their affair he already had a wife. They had a long affair that included the births of Lillian and then Anna.

I had totally forgotten the youngest one Linda Holly!

I don't know the name Brooks but that must be Pat. Sue thinks that Joan is back in NY. I'm glad none of them ever knew I was in Texas.

This was in the new batch of photos. I don't remember going there. I don't know who took it cause Sue is in the photo. Maybe Mom but maybe not. Maybe one of the others there.

That's Lillian and Sue

The whole place looks like a dump now, not that it looked much better in the old days. I do remember the old house a bit. It was huge and had a cellar.

I just remembered something else. When one of the boys was little he used to pick flies off the windows and eat them. We, of course, were totally grossed out.

I remember seeing Aunt Lillian with a big glass jar with paddles inside it and a crank on top. She would put cream in it and crank the handle to make butter.

They had a herd of cows and sold milk but they always skimmed the cream off as much as they could and then thin it with water. The whole thing disgusted Dad.

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