Norma Johnston! Loved her when I was a kid. Did you ever read her Keeping Days series? I think there were six of them, about a girl growing up as one of the middle kids in a large family in Yonkers, NY. I loved that the father named the girls and the mother named the boys, so because the father read all sorts of classic literature, the girls had names like Letitia and Bronwyn, while the boys had plain ordinary ones, like Ben and Peter.