Edna Groscup was born on February 27, 1880, in Toledo, Illinois, a small farming community, not far from the town of Mattoon.  In 1870, her father, Henry J. Groscup, had bought land adjacent to the John VanDyke family in Cumberland County.  Several years later, he married Susan Alice VanDyke and Edna was their first child.  Being the oldest girl, Edna surely helped to raise her brothers, Avery, Orin, and Henry S., and her sister Olive.

By age 20, Edna was teaching school.  Henry and Susan appear to have been hard working people and stern parents.  However, one photograph of the VanDyke cousins betrays the playful, renegade streak in the family.  Taken in a professional studio, the young men are wearing mops on their heads and feminine attire over their suits, while the young women are pretending to smoke cigarettes and laughing.  In the center of all the hilarity sits Edna wearing her horn rimmed glasses and demurely looking down at a book in her lap.

At age 26, after Henry had moved the family to Kansas, Edna met and married Benjamin Akers Wood, a widower and 24 years her senior.  They had 5 children together: Harry, Susie, Maxine, Woodrow, and Jack.  Ben died suddenly in 1926.  The Depression and the Dust Bowl years hit southwestern Kansas shortly thereafter.  Edna moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the early 1930s with Maxine, Woodrow, Jack, and her grandson, Bobby (Susie's son), in order to be close to her widowed mother and youngest brother, Henry S.

Following the deaths of her mother (1938), her brother (1936) and Maxine (ca. 1939) in Colorado, Edna took Bob and followed grown Woodrow and Jack further west to Los Angeles, Califorinia in the early 1940s. 

Edna died in Los Angles at the age of 92 in March 1972, of complications of a hip fracture.  Edna was never heard to complain about the circumstances that life dished out to her.