Week 21: At the Cemetery – Some Erath County Cemeteries

When I began researching my Mam-ma’s family, I wanted to go to Texas to see where my mother and grandmother grew up. I broached the subject to my grandmother and she agreed to go on a trip to Stephenville with me.

The year was 1995. My mother had been gone three years already and I had been working on genealogy research for probably two years. As I worked on Texas research, I really wanted to visit the places my mother lived. Mam-ma was willing, especially as I paid our way, and she made the arrangements for the places we would stay: the homes of her niece, Sandra, and her brother, R.D.

My great-uncle, R.D. was great. He took us all around Stephenville, stopping at each of the houses where they lived. It seemed they moved a lot, looking for better or cheaper places to live. Some were in town and some out in the country. When my grandmother was born, her father was still trying to farm. But it didn’t work out and he learned to fix cars instead, which had a steady income.

I kept notes in a notebook and recorded R.D. and Mam-ma whenever they reminisced. At the time, I brought two cameras: SLR Minolta with black and white film and a pocket-sized Canon that held slides. The black and white film was handy to take photos of photos. Sandra had some good ones that I set in the sunlight from a window and snapped away. I also took photos of tombstones with this camera.

I used the camera with the color slides to take photos of people we visited and buildings and homes we stopped at. I just realized that I have never digitized these images and need to do that soon.

Cemeteries We Visited
Upper Greens Creek Cemetery on the Old Dublin Road. Several Lancaster families are buried in this cemetery:

  • My 3x-great-grandfather, George W. Lancaster (1839-1919)
  • 2x-great-grandparents, Martha J (1873-1942) and William Carl Lancaster (1873-1946)
  • Great-grandfather, George Warren Lancaster (1893-1964) and his wife Lela Ann (1896-1951)  



Lower Greens Creek Cemetery:

  • My 3x-great-grandfather, James M. Coor (1833-1890)


West End Cemetery in Stephenville:

  • My great-grandfather, Thomas N Johnston (1885-1951) and his second wife, Zilpha (1890-1947)

We were lucky that R.D. knew where each of the burials were located so we didn’t have to hunt down the stones. Mam-ma managed to get chigger bites on her ankles.

In all, it was a good trip. I wished I had known what I know now. I would have spent a few more days and insisted that I have time to do some more research. I was taken to the vault in the courthouse in Stephenville and wrote down some information from various vital record books. Later, I got images from Family History Library microfilm. If I had known that, I would have checkout out other record books. I also spent an hour in the public library looking at various books (the same that I later found at the FHL). The one thing that could have added to the trip, would have been to travel to Gustine in neighboring Comanche County and done some research there on my grandfather’s family.

There’s another road trip to Texas to plan for sure.

This is my fourth year working on this year-long 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks prompt, hosted by Amy Johnson Crow. I will write each week in one of my two blogs, either Mam-ma’s Southern Family or at My Trails into the Past. I have enjoyed writing about my children’s ancestors in new and exciting ways.


Copyright © 2021 by Lisa S. Gorrell, Mam-ma's Southern Family, All rights reserved.

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