Her only marriage was to George Edgar Gillis.....he'd been married before and his wife left him a note in his dinner plate, she'd gone and he didn't know where. Maggie Rena and George's honeymoon was a trip to Texas, via first class train, to see her beloved brother Charlie Johnson. She told George she'd marry him "if", he took her to Texas to be re-united with her brother Charlie.

Maggie Rena's life was hard. We can't find records of "what happened" to her mother and daddy. She showed up in census records in different peoples homes. We don't know how she and her brother got separated. She worked as cook and housecleaner for Julian Cole's (prosperous banker in Lawrenceburg) parents. She was working in this home, when she married George Gillis.

Her daughter Annie Russell only told us that she was a "Johnson" , but was raised by the "Hendrick's".........we to this day, do not know why, or what happened that she wasn't raised in her parent's home, Virginia "Jenny" Penney and Sammie Johnson....we do know that her father's sister, Nancy Johnson, married a James H Hendrix, so apparently these are the Hendrix that Annie Russell Gillis was referring too...this would have been Maggie Rena's aunt Nancy Johnson.....great mystery surrounds her childhood.

She had 4 children for George. They lived rurally in Anderson County. She had the name and reputation of being "The Best Cook in Anderson County" in her day. She was partial to her son, the baby Charles, who had struggled since birth to live. There was a story that he loved her so, that he was constantly in the kitchen-where she was. Sometimes when busy, she'd hit him with the butter paddle to get him out of the kitchen and out of her way, while cooking.

We had only one known picture of her. Charlene Gillis Goodlett is in possession of the original photo. She was a beautiful woman., but very large , according to some dresses that were found in a trunk, years after her death. She was short, like her son Charles. She loved the Lord and their church, Salt River Church, which they attended regularly. She died at the young age of 53 yrs old of double pneumonia. There were no antibiotics in her day, so pneumonia killed a person. Her son Charles said that when she was "laid out", she didn't have a dozen gray hairs on her head. Her grave stone in the Sand Spring Cemetery gives her birth as Dec 19, 1887 and death as Feb 2 1942 (Charles her son, said it was 1941 when she died, the stone was wrong).........

I wish I'd known this lady........I've often gazed at her portrait, wondering what she might have been like. She had a certain melancholy appearance to me., a sweet spirit, I believe....I would have loved to have seen her and been around her. Charles had nothing but good things to say about Maggie Rena. Charles told my mother and my sister and I how she seasoned some dishes and how she made some of her delicious dishes. We still do it that way today. I myself had vowed, if I EVER have a daughter, she will be named after Maggie Rena....I love the name Rena, so unusual and so reminding of our past roots, in our grandmother Gillis, Maggie Rena. (submitted by Linda Gillis McElwain) 5/09...more info added....I have recently written a cookbook and honored my grandmother Maggie Rena Johnson Gillis in it...April, 2011