Grandanne was Hunter Peel Alexander's second wife. His first wife, Fannie Vining, had died shortly after Poppy's death. Grandanne was the only mother Poppy ever knew and the grandmother that was most involved with the twins (their other grandmother, Mother Mac, died in 1933 when the twins were about six years old).
Strangely enough, no one had ever mentioned to Mother or her brother that Grandanne was not "their real grandmother" until Mother was in late childhood. Mother was talking with an adult family friend about her grandmother when the woman said, "You know she isn't your real grandmother." Mother ran home and asked her mother to explain it and remembers being very upset that such an important detail had never been discussed with the children. Not that it made any real difference, but it is evidence of the secrecy that their father maintained about his Pine Bluff past.
We do have Grandanne to thank for preserving two bits of family lore.
The first and least significant was that her predecessor Fannie Vining had very beautiful feet.
The second is that she taught the twins to say "Priscilla Duke Davis Hampton Lamb Lanier." Decades later Mother taught me to say it, but couldn't explain who the lady with the long name was -- except that she was someone who had lived with the family when Poppy was a child.
Later genealogical research has proved that PDDHLL was Hunter Peel Alexander's great aunt, and that narrowed her relationship to being either the sister or sister-in-law of his maternal grandmother Mary Davis Peel. But I wouldn't have known about the name Davis if it hadn't been contained within that great long name that Mother learned in childhood. Her obituary is posted on this site.
