| Maud was born February 4, 1893 to Lucy Catherine Wadley
and Dr. Friend Palmer in Cerrillos, New Mexico. Her mother had come
from Missouri with a family, presumably as a domestic. She soon had
a job at the Green Hotel, where she met Dr. Friend Palmer. Dr. Palmer
was from Wheeling, West Virginia. He had come west seeking
more sunshine and had intended to go to Arizona. As he neared
Cerrillos, he learned that there was no doctor in the town and decided
to settle down there. He had an office in the Green Hotel.
Lucy and Friend were married in the Green Hotel April 2, 1891. They
built a house, he established a practice and they were prominent and probably
quite well-to-do.
According to the records, they had another daughter, Mabel Inez, and lost Genevieve in infancy. There was no high school in Cerrillos, so when the girls graduated from grammar school, Lucy moved to Santa Fe with them. She says she wanted them to have milk, so she took her cow along. Lucy was very self reliant, always had a cow, chickens and a garden and sold the surplus. Mabel did not finish school and was married to Oswald Digneo in 1913. Maud graduated from Santa Fe High School in 1911 (Incidentally Zoe and Bill graduated from the same high school in 1933 and 1931). After graduation, Maud taught grammar school in Cerrillos and then moved to Glorieta, New Mexico, where she was the only teacher of the one room school. She married Simeon May 31, l914 and they resided in Kelly, New Mexico. They lived in a small cabin that was part of the Exter Hotel. Zoe was born November 21, 1914, followed by Forbes Palmer, December 26, 1916 and Enid , January 23, 1918. When Simeon left the family in 1920 and moved to Chicago, Maud moved to Santa Fe and went to work as the Dietitian in the Hospital at the Indian School; her sister, Mabel, was working there teaching the girls to mend and Oswald was teaching the boys to paint. Since there was only room for two of the children, Zoe lived with her grandmother and went to the Santa Fe Schools, and Enid and Forbes went to the Indian School. Maud died after a very short illness on May 31, 1926. (The anniversary of her wedding day.) We don’t know the reason for their parting. Since Grandma Palmer raised us and had nothing good to say about Simeon, we definitely had a one-sided story. Among Maud’s things were love letters from Simeon tied with a blue ribbon, and she wore his gold Masonic ring to her death, so we’re sure, at the beginning, there was a deep love. Simeon did send a present to Zoe and Bill when they got married
and he made a trip back to New Mexico in the ‘30’s and saw Forbes and Enid.
Zoe and Bill were on vacation. In the 1960’s Zoe and Bill’s son,
Steven Bart Schnepple was stationed in Biloxi, Louisiana and went up to
Cincinnati to see Simeon several times. Simeon was planning to come
to California to be with us at Christmas, but he died of a heart attack
(shoveling snow) on December 9, 1961.
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