For the Love of Rosie

At age fifteen, Rosie Nestor loved attending school and singing in the church choir with her friend Cerilda, young wife of Reverend Millard Pritchard. But when Cerilda died in childbirth, Rosie's life took on new meaning and responsibilities. Less than a year after his wife's death, Millard proposed to her. A stickler for truth, Rosie refused to marry him until her heart confirmed that she was in love. In good time, her heart responded as Millard had hoped and they set out to serve their God wherever the church leaders dispatched them. Rosie's journey during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through villages in West Virginia, Illinois, and back to West Virginia is a story of devotion to family and principles. Despite poverty and other hardships great and small, she prevailed as a helpmate and mother, guided by humor, hope, and belief in a higher authority that consoled her during sorrow and elevated her soul.