George D. Casto's paternal grandmother's miraculous survival and birth of a child

“While tossing about on his bed in a delirium of typhoid-malaria fever, he was seized by mobocratic hands and thrust head foremost through the window of his own house, to fall in a crumpled mass in the suoav. When his devoted wife, who had kept vigil by her husband, rose to protect him, the ruthless A'illians felled her with a chair. Heaven vouchsafed unto her a few moments of blissful forgetf ulness. With returning consciousness came a realization of her surroundings and of her duty. She crawled to the door, crept through the snow, and found her husband still alive. Under stress of almost superhuman responsibility man sometimes outdoes himself, woman sometimes outdoes herself. . . She prayed as many another has prayed in her anguish of soul. 'More things are wrought by prayer than are dreamed of in our philosophy.' She ministered to her husband's wants, bound up his wounds, and then went down into the Valley of the Shadow to do the mother's part. Thus environed, in all the bitterness of desolation, as the lengthening shadows deepened into the somber bush of that bleak February morn—the twenty-fifth—1846, my father was born. — Millennial Star 84:40”