Cora Lee White

Shortly after giving birth in 1888 to her eighth child Cora Lee, Laura Holt White died. A few months later, widower Charles White admitted his five eldest children (Joseph, Hattie, Ralph, Emma, and Goldie) into the Home from Greenville, Mississippi. Cora Lee joined her siblings in the Home before her third birthday. Charles died in 1893, after Joseph, Hattie, Ralph, and Emma had been discharged to their married, older sister, Bertha White Sulke.

In 1902, Goldie (age 18) and Cora Lee (age 14), were discharged to Bertha. When the girls arrived in Greenville that Sunday in May, a reporter was on hand to observe the “touching, affectionate, and interesting” family reunion. Mrs. Sulke impatiently waited at her gate, wrote the reporter, with a “tender, love-lit expression” on her face. “The little ones soon reached their sister, and with tender kisses she embraced them, when all entered the house, there probably to spend the happiest Sunday of their lives.” Greenville Democrat, May 22, 1902.