She lies next to her husband, our tiny English rose, her half of the large granite monument blank thanks to greedy son Ike, who was too busy spending the family fortune to have his mother's details added.

Oddly, few of the descendants who faithfully bring flowers each year ever mention this "oversight". It's just always been that way, they say.

So there she lies for eternity, neglected in death as she was in life after being transplanted thousands of miles from all that was familiar to the gawdawful place that would be the birthplace of third and last son Ike.

Victoria had been on the throne just over a decade when she entered the world in Bolton, Westmorland, England, on March 6th, 1848, eleventh child of John Savage and the former Ruth Dodd, who resided at the end of Bolton Lane. They named her Anne, but for the rest of her life she would be known as "Annie".

As with many English villages, Bolton's main purpose was to serve a nearby manor, but "only" an estate named Eden Grove, seat of Richard Tinkler, Esq.

Annie's father was a farmer, but probably didn't have any crops or livestock of his own. More likely, he tended Eden Grove's.

Like her siblings before her, she was duly christened at All Saints, the village church, as would be the Savages' twelfth child, Thomas, two years hence. He would be their second Thomas, the first taken by the angels in 1831 before he was even a month old.

Annie's childhood would've revolved around worship at All Saints and religious celebrations, any events at "the Grove" that required or allowed the participation of villagers, and Market Day in Appleby, 3 miles distant.

Like most girls from large families of modest means, when she was old enough, Annie "went into service" with a family in Long Marton, on the other side of the river for which the Eden Valley was named.

In 1871, a young farm laborer named Philip Sowerby was employed in Bleatharn, near Warcop on the other side of Appleby, but much closer to Long Marton than his own Blencarn in Cumberland.

How they met is lost to history. It only matters that they did, and on the 26th of May, 1874, 26-year-old Annie married 22-year-old Philip, now a coal miner. Most likely the wedding took place at All Saints, but family records only show Bolton.

Two weeks before their first anniversary, daughter Mary Elizabeth entered the world in Crook, a mining town in neighboring Durham. She was followed two years later in Long Marton by Arthur, my future grandfather. By 1881, Philip had moved the little family to Penrith, in Cumberland, where he was a "carter master" (whatever that was) with three men in his employ. Annie now had her own live-in servant girl. Two more children would arrive in Penrith: Ruth in the spring of 1881 and John in the summer of 1883.

In the early 1830s, Annie's uncle Thomas Savage had emigrated to Buffalo, New York, where he had established a dairy. By 1859 her brother James had joined him. Annie received letters urging her and Philip to come to Buffalo, which eventually they did.

In December of 1883, when little John was only a few months old, Philip, Annie and the children sailed from Liverpool for Philadelphia on the SS British Crown, built in Belfast in 1879 as the Amsterdam by Harland & Wolff, the same company that would later build the Titanic. H&W leased the Amsterdam to the American Line, whose ships' names all began with "British", hence the name change.

Even in cabin-class, crossing the North Atlantic in the dead of winter was not for the faint-hearted. Back on land again, a "normal" amount of snow for Pennsylvania and upstate New York would be more than Philip or Annie had seen in their entire lives. Not the best beginning for life in a new country.

Then baby John died. Were Annie's people a curse, or was it just Buffalo?

Philip decided he wanted no part of the Savage Family Dairy or Buffalo, and went to Kansas...Kansas!...to find land for his own dairy. Some four months later, in the middle of summer, Annie and the children came to their new home. No record survives of her first impressions of the place she would spend the rest of her life, but as one who has lived though many scorching Kansas summers, it's safe to assume she was wishing they'd never left England.

The dairy prospered and on New Year's Day, 1907, the not-greedy son Arthur, who would inherit it, wed my future grandmother. They'd met while he was delivering milk to the family for whom she worked as a servant, but Grandma would turn out to be quite the snob. She didn't marry an immigrant...she married the eldest son of a successful dairy family.

And having in-laws from England living across the street was not an opportunity to expand her children's knowledge of other cultures or their English roots. Not only did she avoid her mother-in-law as much as possible, she allowed her children to do so too. In fact, my mother was rather proud that she and her five siblings "never had much to do with Grandma Annie because she 'talked funny'...couldn't understand a thing she said". So, because she spoke British, Annie was shunned by her own grandchildren, who didn't have a clue that where she grew up, everybody "talked funny".

A year after Arthur's marriage, his eldest sister Mary, distraught over the failure of her own marriage, committed suicide by setting the outhouse and herself on fire. (Or as my mother so indelicately put it, "torched herself in the toilet".)

Having lost an infant son and then a grown daughter, ignored by her eldest son's wife and children living a stone's throw away, the one bright spot for Annie was when Philip took her back to England in the summer of 1912 for a month-long visit. In anticipation of the journey, they bought new clothes and had studio portraits done by a local photographer, to send ahead to the relatives they would see.

No account of the trip survives, but they brought back photos of Eden Grove in Bolton and Philip's birthplace in Blencarn. Family lore says one of Annie's brothers was an editor at the newspaper in Penrith, but this isn't verified. She had Savage relatives at Appleby, so we can assume they visited there too.

Other than the visit to England, Philip never flaunted his wealth. Instead, it went into trust funds he'd set up for Annie and each of the remaining children, and college funds for their children.

All for naught, it turned out.

Ike, the greedy son, quietly had his father declared incompetent, and through several shady legal maneuvers, secretly transferred every bit of money and property from the trusts to himself. Property that included the house occupied by his widowed sister Ruth and her children, a house Philip had always said would be hers.

Instead, at her father's death in 1924, Ruth was forced to rent it from Ike, her brother, who came around like clockwork on the first of every month to collect.

As for Annie, one family member recalled she nearly starved on the "allowance" Ike gave her...most likely Ruth's rent money re-cycled...begrudgingly doled out whenever he came by with his Society wife to show off a brand-new car or a new fur or some other expensive bauble.

By 1930, Ruth and children had moved from "her" house into the home place with Annie, who died two years later at the age of 84.