Great Aunt Maude’s… official state archives
My mysterious great aunt has an official archive, apparently. While trying to get my hands on it, I’ve run up against some of the microfilm problems Nicholson Baker detailed in Double Fold.
Some background: In November, I learned that Maude Newton Simmons, my great-great aunt and (self-given) namesake, was a teacher, an architectural drafter, [...]
Aunt Maude: teacher, car dealer — and Twain fan?
Maud is a nickname now, one most of my friends call me, but it started as a pen name. I chose it years ago as a sort of homage to Maude Newton, my great-great aunt, a woman nobody wanted to answer questions about.
For the longest time, I only really [...]
On the Newtons, blood, and bank-robbing cousins
My dad’s forebears were glad to tell you about my grandma’s Pre-Revolutionary Virginian ancestor or our connection, by marriage, to the Mannings of football fame, but they seemed to suffer from a peculiarly targeted kind of amnesia when you started asking about the Newton line.
I always assumed this caginess was limited to my little [...]
The Depression, diphtheria, and my mom’s half-sister
According to her death certificate, my mother’s half-sister Bonnie died of diphtheria — “the deadly scourge of childhood” — at five years old, in a town not too far from Dallas.
An aggressive vaccination campaign began in the region around the same time, but perhaps it took a while for word to reach the provinces, [...]
Like we say back home
A few months ago, I re-posted some of my Texan grandmother’s expressions. Since then, my sister and I have thought of a few more that circulated in our family. Two or three are Granny’s, but more are our mom’s:
You sound like a dying cow in a hailstorm. Said to [...]
The sad, mysterious life of my mother’s half-sister
Although my mother was his only child, her father said he had another during his first marriage (of thirteen). He led Mom to believe that the baby died as an infant.
In fact, I discovered this weekend, the little girl lived nearly six years.
Nettie Mason was sixteen and Robert Bruce [...]
The mystery of the Newtons, including my father
I’m not sure what it means when I fixate on genealogical research, as I have been recently, but I have learned to recognize flare-ups of ancestry.com obsession as a warning sign.
Normal people are not awake after midnight, scouring the 1800 U.S. Census for clues about one Jesse Newton, [...]
Happy weekend from the archives: talking Texan
Recently A.N. Devers and I were discussing Texan idiom — she likes “good night alive!” — and I remembered a compilation of my granny’s (pictured) sayings that Dennis DiClaudio published back in November 2003 at the now-defunct parenthetical note.
Although I’d do the translations a little differently now, I promised Allison I’d put the [...]
Happy weekend from the hay hook killer
William Charles Bruce, otherwise known in la casa de Maud as the great-grandfather who killed a man with a hay hook, has always been one of the most compelling characters in my personal deck of Notorious Ancestor Playing Cards. And now he’s the second forbear — his wife Rindia being the first — to [...]
Happy weekend from the domestic shooting target
My mother didn’t know most of the women her dad married, but in email last year casually referred to a shooting. Of her father. By one of the wives.
Next (I think) he married a woman named Evelyn, and, believe it or not, they lived on Daniels Avenue on SMU campus right down the street [...]
Happy weekend from all the women pastors
Her mother being a second-generation Texan atheist, my mom was raised in a godless fashion. When her conversion came, though, it was swift and feverish.
She accepted Jesus into her heart at the direction of staid Presbyterians. Five years later she’d cast off the training wheels — the catechism, the silver-haired [...]
A Q&A with Kathleen Kent about the “Queen of Hell”
Kathleen Kent’s first novel, The Heretic’s Daughter, evokes the fears, diseases, and petty grudges of the witch trials era with an eerie, visceral concreteness. The book was inspired by Kent’s ancestor, Martha Carrier, who was jailed, tried, found to be a witch, and hung. To her dying breath, she refused to confess, or to [...]
Happy Weekend from Plastic World
It’s not as if anyone is clamoring for more family photos, but I figured I should mention that from now on the ancestry posts will appear intermittently, if at all.
For a year and a half, all of my photos and newspaper articles and official documents must remain sealed, along with my composition notebooks and paperwork, [...]
Weekend greetings from someone else’s buzz
Recently I posted a 1914 Dallas Morning News article about a dead woman found on a Galveston beach whom an old family friend misidentified as my great-grandmother, Alma Johnston. I planned to follow up with a couple photos I unearthed of Alma standing in and in front of the waves in Galveston, but [...]
Happy weekend from the possible murder victim’s kin
Whatever I paid to search the Dallas Morning News archives last month allowed me access to something like 50 articles, but only for 24 hours. So after I found what I was looking for (confirmation that one of my mom’s father’s wives really did shoot him), and had exhausted all possible searches on the [...]
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