Here is the story related to me by my Aunt Grace.
Robert Greenwood McCracken who was my grandfather had an affair with Sadie Newcomer. She became pregnant with my father, Olen Quay McCracken. In those days it was a terrible thing for a girl to become pregnant and not be married. When Robert G. found out that she was pregnant he went over to marry her. She was so angry that she refused to have anything to do with him. As she carried the baby her anger could not be comforted. It was relayed to Robert G. that when the baby was born, she was going to throw the baby into the river. He went and retrieved the baby. He was working on the Bell farm and Mary Elizabeth Bell had no children. She was in maternal heaven, because now she had a baby in her house.
Sadie Newcomer eventually married a man named Kester and she gave birth to another son named Henry. She next married a man by the name of Dickey. I think she lived a very unhappy life because of the first birth.
Robert G. married a lady by the name of Sarah Long. When they married, he moved out of the Bell home and Mary Elizabeth was without child again. Robert G. and Sarah Long had a daughter named Nona. When Robert G. divorced from Sarah Long he moved back to the Bell farm and Mary Elizabeth once again had a baby in her house. It was a wonderful time for her. Robert G. next married Laura Ella Geddes and moved out of the Bell home and Mary Elizabeth was without child again.
You will sometimes see her name as Ellie Mc Cracken. They had one daughter named Grace. My father and his father did not get along well at all. My father said he was made to work in the woods driving a team of horses hauling logs at the age of twelve.
When Robert G. died, he gave the farm to his daughter, Grace and my father got nothing. My father bought the farm from his sister, Grace, and decided he was not going to pay her since he considered it his part of the inheritance. She started to foreclose on him, and my mother had some money which she had earned from selling eggs and vegetables. And that is how my mother saved the farm on which your mother came to visit as a child.
My father and my aunt did not communicate from that time until my father got cancer and was dying. Aunt Grace came up to the farm to "save" him, because she was very religious. My father and my mother took me out looking for Sadie Newcomer's grave. All he had to do was to call Aunt Grace and she would have told him that she was in Fruit Hill where you visited.
To my knowledge he never did find his mothers grave. I often think how sad it must have been for him. I hope that this clarifies some things for you. Jim
Clearfield Progress June 29, 1931 - Political Anouncments
Candidates for County Commissioner for the September 15, 1931 Primary
Olen McCracken of Ferguson Twp.
Not Glen McCracken
"Olen is a hard name to get just right, the fellow that owns it told us about it and in his writeup we got it right but when it came to putting the name under his picture a pen slipped and it was made "Glen". So it is Olen not Glen, McCracken who is the candidate for County Commissioner."
Clearfield Progress 1935
Olen M'Cracken of Kerrmoor (D) for Commissioner
In reading the list of names on the ballot one will see the name of Olen McCracken, who seeks the democratic nomination for County Commissioner. Olen McCracken, son of the late Robert G. McCracken, has lived near Kerrmoor all his life, with the exception of eight years at Hyde, and is the father of nine children, all of whom are living. He has been a public servent in the rural delivery service, on election boards, and has been an active member of the U.M.W. of A (United Mine Workers of America) serving as recording secretary and checkweighman at Hyde, and is now a member of the Brick and Clay Workers Union No. 448, at Curwensville. His present occupation is farming and kiln firing. He was a candidate four years ago, receiving the third higest vote, and respectively asks the citizens of Clearfield County to consider his experience and past record. He says, "If elected I will bend every effort to repay the voters in every possible service."