Family Ties

Kate Rosser Cryer

Then I went around the corner and across the street to the Wilson County Courthouse to do a bit more research. I have never done research in a courthouse before, but there was in that place, I would say, a plethora of information. Giant books held information on wills that had been probated here, births, deaths, marriage, cattle brands, and land that had been bought and sold. I traced the land purchases of B. F. Rosser in the 1870s and 1880s. He bought nearly ten thousand acres of land. By the 1890s he had sold it all. I was also able to read the will of my great-grandfather, Richard Robert Creech, who died in 1909 leaving an estate that included four acres of land in Floresville ($1000), undivided half interest in one acre of land in Lodi ($5), one horse ($10), two cows and a heifer yearling ($27.50), household furnishings ($15), and a set of Encyclopedia Britannica ($5). Reading this in the beautiful cursive script of a county clerk a hundred years later, priceless.

The purpose of learning the family history is not to find cattle barons, Texas Rangers, or one-armed Confederate soldiers. I'm interested in how these people lived, what they endured, how they managed their lives through challenging times.  Margaret Mead once said that the span of human memory is five generations -- it is found in what I can tell my grandchildren about what my grandfather's life was like. I really wish I'd known I was going to want to know these things. I would have asked my grandfather many more questions. I'm not going to wait for my grandchildren to ask. I'm just going to tell them.