Weber was born June 3, 1814, in
Earl Township, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to a
Mennonite family of Swiss descent. She was the fifth of ten children born to Johannes Weber and Catherine Gehman. This area, now known as Weaverland, is where Anna and her parents and grandparents were born and where Anna first attended
parochial school. Her father, John Weaver, was ordained a deacon in the Weaverland Mennonite Church in 1820. In April 1825, Anna's family migrated to Woolwich Township in what is now Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada. As first settlers in the newly opened township, Weber's family had to clear the land before they could begin farming. In 1833, Anna's father was ordained minister to the congregation of the new Martin's Mennonite Meeting House, a mile or two west of their farm. Weber was noted for her strangeness, difficulty, and rebellious nature by those who knew her. She never married and continued to live in her parents' home until her mother died in 1864, when Anna was 50 years old (her father had died 10 years earlier). In the 24 years after her mother's death, Anna lived with at least eight different Mennonite families in the area, most for only a year or two. In the mid-1860s, Anna suffered from dropsy, causing her legs and feet to swell so much that she could not get around without assistance, but she seems to have recovered. In 1886, she probably suffered a stroke; after that, she was paralyzed, crippled, and in a lot of pain. In the last few years of her life, she was bed-ridden, but continued to draw and paint while lying on her back, holding her quill pen in crippled fingers. In those years, Anna was taking medicine for her pain and to help her sleep. It appears that she accidentally took the wrong medication or the wrong dosage of one of her medications, and she died in her sleep October 2, 1888. ==Art==