Wichita ? At Wichita State and Friends universities, no one has every heard of Edith and Katherine Erker.

The two sisters, both retired secretaries who lived together in Wichita and died after living into their 90s, didn’t graduate from either school. They left behind no known living relatives to ask why they gave $1.1 million to each of the schools.

“We couldn’t find anything out about them,” said Beth Chiles Hershberger, a spokeswoman for the WSU Foundation. “We wish we would have been able to get to know them a little better.”

The sister’s gifts did not specify what the money should be used for. Wichita State plans to endow a professorship in an academic area yet to be determined; a Kansas Board of Regents program will double the gift to $2.2 million. Friends will use the money to continue renovating its administration building.

Edith Erker, who died in 2000 at 98, had been a legal secretary who also worked in oil and gas drilling. Her sister Katherine, who was a construction company secretary, was 95 when she died in 2002. The third sister who lived with them, Margaret, also reached 98, dying in 2003. She had been a manager for Southwestern Bell.

Their obituaries were brief, listing caregivers as the only other survivors. Near the end of their lives, when they became bedridden, six women helped care for them.

Marilyn Castillo, the chief caregiver, said the three women seemed like their own family unit, with Katherine like a mother, Edith like a father and Margaret like a child the other two looked after.

“Each sister had to have their own nurse aide,” Castillo said. “They could never share. They were always jealous of each other. I miss them very much.”