I never thought I would be on the road to becoming such in 2000. In fact, I knew no more about my father Leo Carter’s life in 2000 than before and after he died on December 22 1986, never to meet my wife nor see my children. Then my daughter told me that my ex, who was born in Rio Novo in the Brasilian State of Minas Gerais, had mentioned that her ancestors may include Portuguese royalty, which got me thinking, “Hm. Maybe I should look for the gems in my family.”.
My point of departure was what my mother had said about our ancestors, including a famous General Ben McCullough who had been hung as a horse thief, and that an unknown man’s name had been struck from the Family Bible for marrying a Comanche woman, something which might qualify me for an unchallenged appointment to any one of the many Bureau of Land Management Computer Specialist jobs reserved for Native Americans in places far more beautiful and less expensive than Washington, D.C.
What I knew about my parents was limited to their names, birth dates and places, whether they had siblings, and a little about their childhood. Beyond that on my mother’s side, I knew and had spent time around her mother and step-father, an uncle, and her grandparents, And it was pretty much the same on my father’s side – I knew his parent’s names, had spent time with his grandparents, and once in 1963 had met an uncle eighteen years his junior born of his father’s second marriage who moved to Burleson Texas where we settled when my father retired. When it comes to ancestral lifestyles, I knew only that there were sharecroppers and railroad workers, and a few scoundrels among them.
All told, then, in 2000 I knew six people on my mother’s side and four on my father’s side by name and face. My father’s mother had died of crush injuries in a roll-over automobile accident when he was ten and I have no memory of meeting his father. And I had online access to incredibly detailed public records which included the complete birth, death, marriage, and divorce registers for the states I most needed – California and Texas – as well as existing free genealogical data bases belonging to the Latter Day Saints and to an Ancestry.com subsidiary Rootsweb.
All I needed to get started, or so I thought because my expectations were very low, was my father’s mother’s middle name, but nine of the ten whom I knew (including my parents) were dead and gone, leaving only one who could have the answer – the uncle I had not seen or spoken to in thirty-seven years. So, hoping he might still be alive and living in Burleson, I looked up his name in the white pages, found a match, and made the call.
The man who answered was indeed my uncle and what he had to say would change everything about my life, past, present, and future. When I asked if he knew my father’s mother’s middle name, he said, “Yeah. It’s Ann. Mattie Ann Carter.” and as I was thanking him expecting maybe to exchange a few pleasantries and hang up, he said, “Are you going the reunion?”
As I watched and felt the bounds of my known personal universe fall away, all I could say was, “WHAT reunion?”
I was then fifty-five and my uncle was then sixty-two and, but for a fortuitous conversation he had had with a Burleson local in the Ace Hardware Store two days before I called, neither of us would have known of the annual Nichols family reunion, which had started in 1938 and had always been held in the small town of Groesbeck in Texas’ Limestone County, where, in 1958 or ’59, my father, mother, sister, and I had last visited my father’s grandparents – William Arthur and Ovlean Bell.
The man my uncle had spoken to had overheard him giving his name to the cashier and had approached to ask if he ever had folks down in his own hometown of Mexia and when my uncle said that he had, that other customer – a complete stranger to my uncle – remarked, “I thought you might. Old William Arthur really put his mark on all the boys and I can see a Nichols comin’ from a mile away. But I wasn’t for sure you’d be one of his until I heard you say your name.”
Having missed fifty-five reunions, I damn sure wasn’t going to miss the fifty-sixth and it turned out to be a bittersweet affair.
On the one hand, I met and enjoyed the company of more than fifty aunts, uncles, cousins, and a variety of their in-laws whom I had never met and learned the fate of many more who had been alive and living near to Burleson when I was graduated from high school in 1963, and, in some cases, for many years after that. Even better and to the great joy of all the regulars, I was taken in for the time I was in Ft. Worth by a first cousin and brought down to the gathering by her with all the available living descendants of my paternal grandfather John Carlton in tow, marking the first time his line had ever been represented.
But there was some sadness for all as well. My father, a popular, overall “B+” student, budding artist, and at, 5’6″, a varsity football player, had graduated Groesbeck High School in 1938 and, with the exception of his grandparents, was never to be seen or heard from again by family he had left behind. Even worse, in 1976 when I was living in Annandale Virginia my parents had come for a visit and given me four B&W family photo albums containing dozens and dozens of pictures that my mother’s mother had kept for many years. But while nearly all of the pictures were dated, the subjects – mostly my father’s family and friends – were not identified and because my father was at a loss when I asked about one person or another, I ultimately discarded the albums.
What would I not have given to have been able to take that body of pictures to the reunion and speak to the one thing on everybody’s mind – What happened to my father?
Afterward, there was anger as well. Why, I shall always wonder, were my sister and I never told about so many who were so near to us for so long? I mean, my father’s step-mother died in 1978, two of his aunts and three of his uncles were alive well into the ’70s and early ’80s, as were most of his twenty-two first cousins by his step-mother along with many of his five maternal aunts, three maternal uncles, and at least three of God knows how many maternal first cousins.
On returning to West Virginia with a substantial cache of Nichols documents, mementos and photographs given to me, I spent the next two years getting as much as I could by combing through the online California and Texas pubic records and as many online family tree sites I could find.
By the end of 2002, when the “identity theft” bogeyman stalked the land and both states either took down or severely cut back on their online public records citing privacy concerns (which, in all probability, was actually a matter of stemming the flow of information on the whereabouts of deadbeat dads, hidden biological parents being sought by their children, and a variety of ne’er-do-wells on the run) I had gotten all there was to get and I put all the pictures and other family markers I had online at PictureTrail, which is linked here under the heading A Family In Texas (1879 – 2001)
I then spent years trawling online genealogies and other electronically published materials. But when it came to the possible figures of note my mother had surmised, there was no there there. A man named Benjamin McCullough was in her line, but he was not the famed General Benjamin McCullough. Rather, her maternal line included a great many McCulloughs beginning with her maternal grandmother Elizabeth Ann McCullough and the only connection to horses was by way of her maternal fourth Great-Grandfather Daniel Davis, a renowned and respected horse trader and member of the DeWitt Colony in what is now Gonzales County Texas and who had two sons who are luminaries of the War for Texas Independence – George Washington Davis of the Old Eighteen and John Davis, who died in the Battle of the Alamo.
Also, the hoped-for connection to the Comanche proved unfounded. There was no Family Bible and the only connection was through my father’s step-mother Floy Elizabeth Carter, the Great-Granddaughter of Joshua Moses Jackson who was slain, probably by Comanche, in the October 1858 Jackson Massacre which happened in the southeast part of Texas’ Mills County and near to the site there is a roadside historical marker.
By the time I finally set the family tree project aside, I had amassed a data base of 3,623 persons, some 900-odd such were actual blood relatives. But all I knew about what happened to my father after he left Groesbeck in 1938 and when I was born in 1945 was that he had worked as a trunk-maker alongside his father before being drafted and had begun his USAF career in 1941 as an Enlisted Pilot in the USAAF.
And wouldn’t you just know that it would be my little sister, Teresa Fay, who would lob a nuke into my new universe of understanding.
I can’t remember when, but sometime in the past five or six years, my sister handed off to me a 12 ½” X 9″ grey metal lockbox that she had obtained while settling our mother’s estate following her death on September 24 1987, and in it was the entirety of my father’s official and personal military service records, tax records, military/civilian awards and certificates, and some news clippings about him, ranging from 1941 to 1962. Based on the contents of that file and my years of online research, there are few questions about him and his whereabouts that I cannot now answer, including where he was and with whom on a day-to-day basis during his time in the South West Pacific theater of World War II.
Now, at age 70, with all who were most curious in 2000, at what proved to be the last Nichols family reunion, also now beyond mortal reach, I have become what amounts to the last of my father’s keepers…