
I am very lucky to have known my great grandfather Robert Sidney Foreman born in 1871 in Time, Pike County, Illinois. Sid came to Colorado in 1887 and lived in Vernon, about 10 miles south of Wray, with his parents and 3 sisters and 3 brothers. When Sid was 21 he applied for a homestead patent. After 5 years he sold his land and purchased a steam engine and the necessary equipment to thresh and cut sod. He hired out to thresh oats and cut sod all over eastern Colorado. He settled in Elbert, Colorado in 1900 where he met Grace Irene Squires. They were married in 1904 in Denver.
I am also fortunate to have grown up in a large family that liked to get together and of course someone always had a camera.

Aunt Ivy never married and it seems she was available to help her sister Grace and brothers Clarence and Harvey raise their children.

Sid Foreman’s wife, Grace, died in 1933 at age 53 and he never remarried. He lived with his daughter Mary Frances Hancock in Loveland, Colorado for a number of years and then moved to Golden, Colorado and lived with his son Jacob.

Sid visited our home in Pleasant View many times when we were young. He lived nearby in Golden with his son Jacob and his family. Mom would fix all of us the same thing for lunch, cream soup on toast! On Sunday’s he would come for dinner after church and when dinner was finished he would walk us up the street to Brownie’s gas station. They had a candy counter there and he would by us each a nickel’s worth of the penny candy. Some of the candy was two or three for a penny so we would walk home with a mouthful and a handful of candy.

Sid Foreman died in 1962 at age 91, I was in junior high, 8th grade then. The funeral was in Elbert, Colorado at the Presbyterian church. He is buried with his wife Grace at the Elbert Cemetery. The family plot also includes Robert James Foreman and his wife Evelyn and their daughter Loreen. Grace’s parents Edwin Squires and Mary Salina Squires and daughter Mary Ivadine Squires and son Jesse Squires are buried in the plot adjacent to Sid and Grace. According to a book written by a local Elbert historian who has indexed the cemetery there is an unmarked grave in this plot.