A Name We Never Knew
What Frannie's obituary tells us about what Estrella kept
Buried Threads is a podcast about family secrets, silence, reinvention, and what happens when lost stories begin to resurface. If you’re new here, we recommend starting with Season 1. This post follows Episode 3 of Season 2.
Frances (Frannie) Nelson Ferguson died on November 26, 1963. She was 24 years old, married just months before she passed, taken by ovarian cancer before she had a chance to build much of an adult life.
Her obituary is small as obituaries go. Survived by her parents and husband. Her brother Edward. A half-sibling on her father’s side. And then: another sister, Mrs. Florence Noll.
Florence.
If you’ve been listening since Season 1, you know that name. Florence DeBoard, later Mrs. Florence Noll, was our great-grandmother’s firstborn with Christopher Columbus DeBoard. The daughter who spent her childhood with the Redburns, in foster care. She seemed to have on-and-off contact with Christopher but no known contact with Estrella. The daughter who, as far as anyone knew, Estrella had left behind and never looked back.
And yet, here she is. In a 1963 obituary that Estrella almost certainly wrote herself, listed among the surviving family members of a sister that Florence likely didn’t know she had.
Florence’s married name is in that obituary. Estrella knew what Florence’s last name was, which means she knew Florence had married. It also means she had been keeping track of her in some way, maybe quietly, at a distance. She never shared about her with Edward or Teri, or anyone else in her new life that we know of.
We’ve thought about what it took to write that line. To acknowledge a daughter publicly, in print, when you’ve spent decades not acknowledging her privately. To put her name in a newspaper and to just let it be there.
Was it guilt? Grief? Was she worried someone would ask her about Florence? Was it a way of finally saying something she’d never been able to say out loud?
We don’t know. But we don’t think she wrote that line carelessly. We think she knew exactly what she was doing.
🧵You can’t bury every thread, some roots go deeper than the dead.
-Angie & Cyndi
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