Cather, Elsie Margaret (1890-1964) (“Bobbie”). Cather’s sister. Born in Red Cloud, NE, shortly before Willa Cather graduated from high school, Elsie attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln from 1908 to 1910, before transferring to Smith College, in Northampton, MA, from which she graduated with an A.B. in English and Latin in 1912. She undertook graduate study at the University of Nebraska in 1914 and in 1916 received her A.M. with a major in philosophy and a minor in English. At both the undergraduate and the graduate level at Nebraska, she studied under Louise Pound. She began a career in high school teaching in 1912, when she took a position in Lander, WY, where her brother Roscoe then lived with his family. She also taught in Albuquerque, NM; Corning, IA; Cleveland, OH; and briefly Red Cloud, when illness in the family brought her home. Her longest tenure as a teacher was at Lincoln (NE) High School, where she began teaching in 1920, with Olivia Pound and Mariel Gere as colleagues. Willa Cather's expectation that Elsie be responsible for aging family and friends and for legal affairs after their parents' deaths sometimes brought the sisters into conflict. Elsie Cather retired from Lincoln High School in 1942. She died in Lincoln.

Cather, John (1892-1959) (“Jack”). Cather’s brother. Born and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Jack was the seventh child and fourth son of Charles and Virginia Cather. He was nearly two decades younger than Willa Cather, and she was a doting older sister when he was a small boy. Because she missed him after her 1896 move to Pittsburgh, PA, she wrote several poems about him and the story “Jack-a-Boy” (1901). After graduating from Red Cloud High School in 1912, Jack studied for two years at University of Nebraska in Lincoln. With Willa Cather’s encouragement, in 1914 he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study engineering. Willa Cather was then living in New York City but traveled to Pittsburgh to help him settle in and enjoyed visiting him and supported his decision to change his major to theater. It is not clear whether he graduated from Carnegie Tech but the British government trained him as a chemist so he could inspect munitions factories. While working in Smethport, PA, he met Irma Wells, and they married in 1918. They had two children, Catherine and Ella Faye. After World War I, he worked as a chemical engineer in the oil industry in Cincinnati, OH, Casper, WY, and Bradford, PA. In 1936 he moved to Whittier, CA, and became a business partner with his brothers Douglass and James in an oil production company. He died in Long Beach, CA. Willa Cather mentions him frequently in letters, but she seems to have had little contact with him and his family in later years, and no letters from her to him have surfaced.

Lowery, Hamilton B. (1850-after 1916). American physician. Born in Virginia, a son of farmer Thomas Lowery and Martha Lowery, Hamilton Lowery became a physician in West Virginia, where his extended family lived. He and his wife, Austie T. Lowery, had no children. Widowed, he came to Lincoln, NE, in the late 1880s and by 1887 was professor of physiology at the University of Nebraska. In 1899 he was professor of nervous and mental diseases at the Omaha Medical College, although he retained his home and practice in Lincoln. His niece, Ina Lowery, kept house for him. Hamilton Lowery treated Mary Virginia Cather, Willa Cather’s mother, during a long spell of bad health c. 1900, and kept Willa informed of her mother’s health.

Garber, Winifred Richardson (1869-after 1930) (“Fred,” “Freddie”). Cather's Red Cloud acquaintance. Winifred Richardson, born in Nebraska, was the eldest daughter of stockman William N. Richardson, a prototype for Mr. Trueman in Cather’s “Two Friends” (1932). She attended a boarding school in St. Joseph, MO, from 1883-1886. In 1888 she married William Seward Garber, son of Silas Garber, a prototype for Captain Forrester in Cather’s A Lost Lady (1923). They had three daughters. The family moved to Lincoln, NE, then to Buffalo, NY; Winifred and her daughters moved to Los Angeles, CA, around 1920; she subsequently divorced her husband.