The sudden death of Papá Andrés left nine fatherless children, five sons and four daughters. Praxedis was the oldest, followed by Eugenio, Eleuterio, Eustorgio, and Andrés Jr. The youngest child, Andrecito, died on March 14, 1914, when he was about one-and-a-half years of age. Anastacia had a faint memory of her small, light-complexioned brother, Andrecito, crawling on the floor and under the beds. The daughters were Guadalupe, Flavia, Natalia, and Anastacia.

Another child, Florencia, was born after Flavia. Florencia died of hydrocephalus, or marsusuelo, a birth defect in which the cranium of the brain does not fuse together and swells with liquid, causing infection, convulsions, and death.

After Papá Andrés's death, Praxedis, at age twenty the oldest son, and Mamá María took charge of the family. They led the family with a great deal of love, respect, and obedience to the elders and raised the family members in harmony and unity. Decisions were made in everyone's best interest. They struggled together through good times and bad.

One near disaster after the death of Papá Andrés drew the family even closer together. In the final months of 1913, the older male members of the family were burning prickly pear cactus for the cattle after all the field crops had been harvested. They burned cactus every afternoon to supplement the livestock's diet of dry grass. The burning of prickly pear was done over an open fire. The men unctured the cactus paddles with a forked stick and passed them through the fire to burn off the thorns. The thornless leaves were then fed to the cattle. The thick trunk of the cactus plant was also passed through the fire and chopped into small pieces with a machete. One afternoon a strong wind came up after they had covered the fire with sand to put it out. The wind evidently uncovered the fire; it re-ignited and spread through the dry grass and burned the corncrib that Papá Andrés had built.

At the beginning of 1914, the family began to make improvements on the main house to better serve the expanding family. That year they moved the house from Rancho El Fresnillo to Andrés's property. The house was a large one-room wooden frame house with a wood floor. A separate kitchen had a large rock chimney. The house was lifted and set on wagon axles drawn by mules. The workers used several sets of axles and also several teams of mules and horses to pull the house into some road tracks alongside the edge of the field. This one-room building was placed with the front door facing east, the exact opposite from the direction that it had previously faced. Later Praxedis and his brothers built a lumber partition to divide it into a two-room house. On another trip they hauled the kitchen. In the region almost all of the kitchens, which had dirt floors, were built separate from the house. The family detached the kitchen from the chimney, so, because it had no floor, it was not excessively heavy to move to the new location. They again kept the old kitchen separated from the house, placing it a few feet away in a northwest direction. They then used it as a storehouse or implement shed called a cochera. The old chimney was left at Rancho El Fresnillo.

The family built additions to the house as the need arose. When Praxedis married, he added a new room to the north. When Eugenio married, a new room was added to the south side. Around 1925 Praxedis built his own house near Santa Cruz, and Eugenio constructed a house at Rancho La Gloria. When Eleuterio married, he moved into the room that Eugenio had vacated. The family eventually added a large porch on the east side of the house and put wooden shutters over the windows of the rooms on the west side, protecting the rooms from the sun.