Mary Catherine Henry Rawles Herren

Known as Grandma Herren to her great-great grandchildren, she has been a focal point of stories in my father’s family for as long as anyone can remember. My father and his first cousins never knew her personally; she died in 1936, and only my second cousin remembers her funeral. But her stories, told by her, then retold by her children and grandchildren, and still told today by her two- and three-greats grandchildren, with much humor and a little pride, live on. It has been left to her descendants to add a bit of official record to support and expand those stories, to remember for the rest of us. This is my first attempt to do that.

Early Life and First Marriage

Mary Catherine Henry was born in 1843, either in Bell, Crocket Co., Tennessee, according to her obituary, or in Providence, Madison Co., according to family stories.[1] She was the oldest of six children; her parents were Martha Ross and John L. Henry (known to her Arkansas descendants as John Logan Henry). There is a bit of information about John L. Henry and his family in Goodspeed’s History, published in 1890.[2] Her family were Presbyterians and farmers in west Tennessee. In 1854 her grandfather and another close male Henry relative sold some of their land to the trustees of the Presbyterian Church and to the Masonic Lodge in Denmark, Madison County.[3] That same year, her father, John L. Henry and William Henry (either his brother or his father) divided their jointly owned land in Denmark.[4]

Her stories, and at least one photograph, reflect a fearlessness – maybe a bit of impetuousness - in Mary Catherine. By 1860, at age 16 (she claims to be 18 in that census), it is likely that Mary Catherine was living in Toones Station, Hardeman County, Tennessee, with her new husband, Hew Rawles, a 25 year-old school teacher, and new baby, John Logan Rawls. Her parents were living in Jackson, but by the next year they moved to Arkansas, probably to the area around Gaines Landing, Chicot County. For unknown reasons, Mary Catherine and John Logan moved also, and her daughter, Sarah Jane, known to her descendants as Sallie Rawls, was born in March of 1861, in Chicot County, Arkansas. A month after Sally’s birth the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter.

Civil War Mysteries

According to family stories, Sally’s father, Mr. Rawles (or Rawls – none of her descendants knew his first name), disappeared, ostensibly after the Henrys moved south, and it is possible that he was killed in the Civil War. There was an H. B. Rawles who enlisted as a sergeant in the 20th Arkansas Infantry, Company H, organized in the spring of 1862, which fought in a battle at Toones Station, Hardeman County, Tennessee, in July of that year. Family history states that Mary Catherine’s father was a soldier in the Civil War. A couple of possible records could be him: in First (Stirman's) Battalion Sharpshooters, formerly Brooks' 1st Arkansas Cavalry Battalion, there is a John L. Henry in Company C. In February of 1862, a J. L. Henry enlisted with Company K, 18th Arkansas Infantry. Also in this company was a James Ross. John L. Henry’s wife Martha was a Ross. This company was organized at Pine Bluff and at De Valls Bluff, both north of Chicot County.[5]

Stories about Mary Catherine’s dealings with the Union soldiers are still a favorite to tell in my family. Her spunk must have been one of the things that helped her and her mother get through the war. It also did not hurt that she, or more likely her mother, was a member of the Eastern Star – the women’s auxiliary of the Masons. John L. Henry was probably a member of the lodge in Denmark, Tennessee, when he sold land to them in 1854. According to family legend, after Mary Catherine and her family were harrassed by Union soldiers camped at nearby Holly Grove, Desha County (they reportedly tore the strings out of her piano and put hay in it for their horses to feed on, among other things), she marched into the enemy camp to protest. When the officer in charge saw that she wore an Eastern Star ring, he told his men to leave her alone. The implication was that his loyalty to the Masonic order overshadowed his political leanings, but he could have just been a sensible man.

After the War

John L. Henry died either in 1865 or in 1868 and is said to be buried in the Henry plot at Holly Grove Cemetery, although there is no stone now.[6] In 1870, Mary Catherine and her widowed mother were living at Gaines Landing, Bowie Township, with several children.[7] 1872 is a year of big changes for the Henrys. Mary Catherine’s brother, Thomas Ross Henry, moved to Drew County, and married Sue M. Duncan in June. Mary Catherine herself married Mr. James H. Herren in September, in Chicot County. Duncans and Henrys were intertwined in the early years. Along with Thomas Henry’s marriage, their sister Mattie married S. T. “Sam” Duncan in 1884. A “J. T. Duncan” was the security on Sam’s marriage license, and “J. T. Duncan” was a founding member of the Tillar Methodist Church, where the Mrs. Herren and her descendants (the Kings and Peacocks) were members at the end of the century. I believe J. T. is James T. Duncan, brother of Sue Duncan Henry and son of James G. Duncan.[8] The third Duncan is one I recently discovered through a forgotten marriage and have not yet been able to connect to these other Duncans: Mary Catherine’s daughter Sally Rawls married W. W. Duncan in 1877, although he died just a few years later, before 1880. In December of 1881, Sally married Daniel Henry King, my great–great grandfather. To put it in traditional patriarchal terms, if W. W. Duncan had lived, we would have all been Duncans instead of Kings.
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[1] McGehee Times, McGehee, Desha County, Arkansas, “Obituary [of Mary Catherine Henry Rawls Herren],” March 13, 1936.
[2] There are several versions and reprints of “Goodspeed’s”; one is: The Goodspeed biographical and historical memoirs of southern Arkansas, 1890 (Easley, S.C.: Southern Historical Press, 1978). Thomas Ross Henry’s entry, which also mentions his parents and siblings, will be in Drew County. For “James T. Duncan,” a good online version transcribed by Terri Buster, accessed 12/10/2007: http://www.rootsweb.com/~ardrew/dcgood.html.
[3] Jonathan K. T. Smith, Genealogical Gleanings from the Deed Books 10-19, 1845-1857, Madison County, TN, 1995; accessed 12/13/2007: http://www.tngenweb.org/records/madison/smith/deed10-9.htm.
[4] Eternal thanks to Alan Alsup, Henry researcher, who contributed so much on the Henrys’ early ancestors.
5 Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System (National Park Service): http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/soldiers.cfm
[6] Holly Grove Cemetery is on the National Register of Historic Places. It is located on Highway 4 (Crooked Bayou Road), about 2 miles south of McGehee, headed toward Arkansas City.
[7] The 1870 census counts Bowie Township as Chicot County, but other records put it in Desha County. (To add to the confusion, some records in 1872 state that Arkansas City was in Chicot County.) Chicot, Desha, Drew and other surrounding counties had fairly flexible borders at different times. Here is a link to a great quasi–interactive map that shows changing county borders from 1813 to 1925 – however, the last time I checked it the page was not found: http://www.myarkansasgenealogy.com/ar_maps/ar_cf.htm - a cached version is at: http://209.85.207.104/search?q=cache:I1_WB2GshroJ:www.myarkansasgenealogy.com/ar_maps/ar_cf.htm+myarkansasgenealogy+maps
&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us
[8] See Goodspeed’s online: http://www.rootsweb.com/~ardrew/dcgood.html

Credit where it is due

As I begin to post essays to this blog, I do it with some trepidation. Thanks to Google, a few years ago I found excerpts from an essay I had posted on my website (written by my uncle and duly credited) on two or three other sites. The references were copied and pasted – completely uncredited. Just edited into the text as if it were written by the authors of those sites. I was furious, of course, as I get sometimes, and added a line to the page below the essay that I’ll quote here (I think I also emailed them with a complaint):

“This essay is copyrighted. If you quote or use information from this essay in your research or on your web page, please cite this web page as you would any source quoted.”

Thankfully, the excerpts no longer come up when I search, although who knows how the information has become incorporated into other off–line documents. So, I write this note here as a simple request to all of us surfing or posting to the web to respect others’ work – research and writing, still images and other media (don’t know enough about it to include music downloading here). If you use any bit from this site or any other source (site, article, book, etc.), please use quotation marks around a direct quote and give ample information on where you got the quote or the information. (By the way, feel free to use my copyright statement above without citation.)

Several sites offer information on how to cite electronic sources, but a simple citation like this will suffice:

http://www.bestsource.edu/page; accessed Month/Day/Year.

Here’s one citation guide:
http://www.h-net.org/about/citation/

Here’s Wikipedia’s take on Fair Use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Some sites with information on citing sources in genealogy, which can be applied to other topics:
http://www.genealogy.com/19_wylie.html

A simple Google search with ["how to cite" genealogy] brings up plenty of articles and examples.

While we’re on the subject, here are several websites coming under the very broad heading of ethics that may be of interest to some:
http://del.icio.us/airgid/ethics

Here’s my original page that was not cited:
http://bama.ua.edu/~rdobson/family/JamesBoykin.htm

Thanksgiving

For the last several years – since I’ve been working on my father’s family history – I come home from Thanksgiving family reunion wishing I had taken more time to look around at courthouse and library records while there. So, this year I planned it better. I took off work earlier than usual for Thanksgiving in order to get to some courthouses in southeast Arkansas before the holiday. After a long drive through Mississippi, I hit Lake Village, Chicot County, Arkansas, about 3pm. I picked up a new state map at the beautiful visitor’s information center – it is like someone’s wooden vacation house with a huge deck built partially over the lake – and then drove on to the courthouse to look for evidence from the past of my ancestors in this county.

But my move into the past had already happened out on the highway, along about the dip in the geography that happens when you come into Greenwood, just before you get to the Yazoo River. I haven’t looked at a geological map of Mississippi, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is one of the borders of the Mississippi River Delta region.

Every November, for as many years as I can remember, that bleak, gray-green landscape spreads as flat as water out before us on the drive to see my grandparents. On either side of the car, converging perspective lines of cotton or soybean or rice stubble rattle past. And above us, dominating our view on every side, was–-is--the umbrella of sky with whatever scape it was bathed in. In November, it is often dark rain clouds on the horizon. When you have that much unbroken sight, you can see the weather going on simultaneously at different ends of the land. Threatening clouds over a curtain of rain soaks a couple of miles over there, and, as if watching time travel before you, rays of light break through clouds on this side, clearing and drying fields. A very old memory comes up of riding in the car with my Granny, informing her with my characteristic dead certainty that those rays beaming through the clouds were “God’s light.”

Also breaking the miles of flat fields is the wreckage of ancient agricultural equipment. Once, in the 1980s, I was driving my grandfather around Desha County. He saw one of those wrecks ahead of us and asked me to stop, and then asked me to take a picture of him with it, which I thought was strange at the time. Later I came across a much older photo that he must have taken himself of the same kind of equipment on the side of the road. A friend of his told me that the machine was a diesel powered water pump for irrigating crops. Granddaddy, who could fix any motor, and earned his living that way for a good part of his life, appreciated machines. I think by taking the photo, he was making a portrait of the old machinery, like a family photo, and a reminder of the old life.

Driving down from the hills into the delta lands is like a hypnotist’s cue for me to move into the past, mine and others. The long low land uncurls itself before me in an unending scroll of old stories, old memories, the memories of others, the memories of the dead that I and my family now must remember for them.