Today is the anniversary of the birth of my maternal great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Thomas (1859-1926). Mary was the only daughter of George and Caroline Roberts Thomas, born in Illinois. She had an older brother, James, and a twin brother George.
Mary’s father died when she was just one year old, and her mother soon remarried, to Eliftet Taylor in 1861. Eliftet died after only a few years, however, and her mother married again, this time to John F. Watkins. Mary is listed on the 1870 census as “Mary Watkins,” and a 6-year-old child identified as a sister, named Minnie, appears on the census along with Mary’s brothers. This may have been a child from the earlier marriages of either Eliftet or John, but I don’t know for sure.
Mary moved with her family to Kansas sometime before 1875, and then to Nebraska before 1885. By that time, Mary’s aunt Martha (Caroline’s sister) was also in Nebraska with her husband, John Butler Workman, and the families of six of the couple’s children. It is important for Mary’s story that John Butler Workman and his family were accompanied to Nebraska by his nephew, Thomas Calvin Workman, Sr., and his wife and child. After the death of Thomas Calvin’s first wife, Etta, Tom married Mary, Caroline’s daughter. One record says that Mary had tended to Etta while she was ill, and had helped with the children – three, by the time Etta died. It is not surprising that Tom married his 30-year-old spinster sort-of-cousin after Etta’s death.
Mary and Tom had two children in Nebraska before they moved again, this time to take part in the 1889 Land Run in Oklahoma, the first of several land runs to settle what had formerly been reserved as Indian Territory. In 1889 Tom claimed land in Logan County, Oklahoma, outside of Guthrie, the town that would serve as the territorial capital until statehood in 1907. Mary and Tom had eight more children in Oklahoma, including my grandfather, Thomas Calvin Workman, Jr., their ninth (and next-to-last) child.
Mary must have hoped that the family was settled for good; but in 1915, they moved once again, this time to El Campo, Texas, in the southeast part of the state. Some family members did not move with them; Mary’s daughters Lulu and Tina stayed in Oklahoma, where they married and raised their families. This was to have lasting consequences; in the course of my genealogy research, I have come to know several of Tina’s grandchildren, my second cousins, who knew no more of my existence than I knew of theirs.
Life in El Campo was not necessarily easy. The 1918 influenza epidemic hit the family hard; Mary and Tom lost their oldest son, Wesley (Mary’s stepson), and Tom Jr. (my grandfather) was very ill and survived a coma that resulted from the flu.
Mary died in El Campo in 1926.
I connect to Mary through my Workman family line.
I Seek Dead People 