“Allegheny Moon” is the biography of Cynthia grand mother, Edna (Nanna) Bell. You are seeing her wedding picture here. She was raised in a house overlooking the railroad line and would lie in her big feather bed and listen to the coal trains as they went by each night. Her father worked first as a coal miner and then ultimately for the railroad. Edna’s aunt Nell and uncle Henry lived “up the holler” and became the foster family for 4 year old John Bell when his father died of TB (his mother had died giving birth to him).
Edna and John fell in love, married and moved up north to a succession of homes outside Morgantown West Virginia in the area around Pedlar’s Run. *Note here that in that part of the world a “run” is called a “creek” in most other places.* They raised 4 children on a coal miner’s pay. One of those children was Nancy who was Cynthia’s mother. John eventually came down with black lung and they lived for quite a while on the United Mine Worker’s Black Lung pay of $90 a month plus what they could make share cropping on a small place up Pedlar’s Run Road. While this was Edna Bell’s story it was also the story of so many wives and mothers in the Allegheny Mountain’s.