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.

Comments

Post a Comment

All comments on this blog will be previewed by the author to prevent spammers and unkind visitors to the site. The blog is open to other-than-just family members particularly those interested in family history and genealogy.

Popular posts from this blog

Last One Standing: Reginald F. Lancaster

Image
It is important to document the lives of those who left no descendants. I have been researching and writing as much as I can about family members who either never married or who married but had no children. They have no descendants who will do the research or even take DNA tests. But they will not be forgotten. Reginald F. Lancaster, my second great-uncle, was the son of George Wilson Lancaster and Martha Jane Polly. He was born 22 July 1887 in Phoenix, Maricopa, Arizona, the fifth child of six. [1] His parents divorced when he was five. [2] His father moved back to Texas and Reggie probably never saw his father again. Reggie’s mother married Noah Flood Parks in 1893 and he grew up with two younger half-sisters. Sometime in the early 1900s, the family moved to Imperial County, California, to do farming. When Reggie registered for the draft, he was working at ranching. At age 29, he was of medium height and weight and had blue eyes and brown hair. He was still single. [3] I have
Read more

John Coor of Copiah County Made an Agreement with Joel Hoggatt

Image
This week at RootsTech 2024, FamilySearch announced a new feature that an every-word search was available for U.S. deeds and probates. It is still in the trial mode and can be found at https://www.familysearch.org/en/labs/ . This is the search screen. It clearly states it is for US land and probate records and Mexico notary records. You can do a keyword search or if you click on the “more options” you can add a name. My Find I immediately gave it a try and searched first for records of the COOR family using the keyword search. Up first came deeds from Wayne County, North Carolina.  At the top, you can filter using record year, record type, record place, and collection. For the past few days, I have mainly filtered by record place. I filtered down to Mississippi. You can even filter to the county. The first entry was a document I had not seen before. It was an 1826 agreement between John Coor and Joel Hoggatt to build a set of grist and sawmills. John Coor is my 4x-great-grandfath
Read more

Locating the Comic Book that Named My Great-Uncle

Image
Have you ever thought to look for an ancestor in a comic book? Many years ago, while speaking with my grandmother, she told me that a comic book had been written about her brother, Rayburn D. (R.D.) Lancaster while he was serving in the Army Air Forces in World War II. I thought that interesting and tried several times to locate this comic book in comic book stores. However, none of the proprietors knew what I was talking about. These stores were more focused on superhero comics. R. D. Lancaster enlisted in the Army Air Corps on 14 January 1942 as an aviation cadet. He was twenty-one years old. [1] He trained in Chickasha, Oklahoma. When he wrote home, he said he had acquired the nickname “Rip.” During his first solo flight, in checking his parachute, he noticed a string and upon pulling on the errant string, caused him to be lifted several feet off the ground. [2] Fast forward in time, a fellow volunteer at the History Center where I volunteer is an avid fan of comic books, so
Read more