Born the 11th of 12 siblings.

Edna worked as a clerk in an Oakland gift shop. She was remarkably proud and authoritative, and affected a British accent. She was neither well educated nor well traveled, nor particularly accomplished, but she considered herself erudite.

With her first husband, George Algie, whom she married at age 17 and from whom she was divorced, she was the mother of Winona Algie Bridston (1920-1967). Through her daughter she became a grandmother.

In 1939, when her daughter was no longer a child, Sarah Edna Algie married her second husband, Stanley James Cardwell. He had also been divorced from his first spouse. They were married until his death 11 years later. At some point, though she was an adult and was not adopted by her mother's second husband, Winona Algie changed her name to Winona Cardwell.

Three years after the death of her second husband, she was married a third time, to Oren Yorgason, a man who had also divorced his first wife.

Both her second and third husbands had children from their first marriages. However, Sarah Edna Butterworth Algie Cardwell Yorgason did not tolerate her step-children and she considered her daughter Winona as her only child.

She allowed her step-children to eat at the dining table at mealtimes; at all other times, her step-children were not permitted to be seen nor heard in their home. The common rooms in the house were off-limits to them, and in the family home they were allowed only to use the bathroom and their bedrooms. It does take a different kind of parent to perpetrate this type of child abuse, and a very different kind of co-parent to allow it.

She died alone in her trailer, in an isolated trailer park off of Highway 17, just north of the city of Santa Cruz.