Contributed by Hazel W. Craig ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ From Tennessee: Union Parish Louisiana holds many great childhood memories of both joy nad sorrow. I want to think of the happy days. - In the summer of 1929, about my earliest memory, my mother had to have an appendectomy at Ruston Lincoln Hospital. It was decided Grandma Jennie Welch and Grandma Sallie Andrews would keep my baby brother, Willie Welch, Jr., who was just under three years of age and I would go stay with Mother and Daddy's best friends, Thelma and Stanley Fitzgerald. I enjoyed my stay with them so much when my parents got back home I wanted to stay with the Fitzgeralds. They had spoiled me rotten. Mother was in hospital two weeks, and then was at my Uncle William Gray's home in Ruston for another week, so the three weeks were filled with undivided attention. Through the years going back to Louisiana from, in those days, Michigan, I would always visit Thelma and Stanley. I was unable to visit La. when either of them passed away but on every trip south would go to Pisgah Cemetery and visit their graves. Even today I can close my eyes and see Uncle Dan Grafton, Thelma's father, his snow white hair shinning when he knelt in Pisgah Church to pray. Funny the things a child really remembers! Stanley Fitzgerald was second cousin of my dad's and also he was a cousin to the Graftons. I caught my first school bus at Grafton Crossing on Hwy. 167. In the fourth grade of school one of my only three first cousins came from St. Louis, Missouri to stay with my grandmother and go to school. Do you remember Frank W. Griffith, Jr. He attended the sixth, seventh and eighth grades in Bernice in 1933, 34, and 1935. He was the school's best boxer. And a handsome kid from the north as they called him. Frank was like a big brother to me, always protecting me from any unhappeness that came up. Frank Griffith passed away in November 1990 after a long bout with cancer and buried in Illinois, leaving his widow, Ann Kozak Griffith. During a long stay in the Marines in the South Pacific in WWII he contracted malaria, which he carried in his bloodstream until his death, rendering him unable to have children. Frank was in the Second Marine Division and was nearby when he saw one of the Fomby boys from Bernice killed in action. They were friends when Frank was in La. years earlier and ended up in the same unit. Frank enlisting from Illinois and Fomby from Bernice. My high-school years were spent going to Church at Weldon Baptist Church where I was saved in 1936 and baptized by Bro. M. V. Burns. And that occured in the Fuller Pond too. I enjoyed going to Weldon and the fellowship I had with the Browns, the Lees, Thurmonds, Youngbloods, etc. will never be forgotten. Four generations on my Welch side are buried in the Weldon Cemetery. Four generations of my Andrews side are also buried there. And I have identified an unmarked grave next to my grandfather Andrew's parents as being Mollie Andrew's mother, Martha Scott Carley. A marker has already been cut and on my next trip to La. I will have it erected in the Weldon Cemetery. Her grave was marked with a half of a well tile. You may have seen this pretty brown half tile. It has been there 60 years that I know of and was actually placed there many years before that and I will leave it as is, and place marker inside the tile. My cousin Sibyl Slavin of Oklahoma helped identify grave from a letter she received in the 1980's. I have placed several CENOTAPH monument markers in TN., have one ready to be placed in New Hope Cemetery at Three Creeks, AR. for my Jenkins Hansford Welch who came from MS. to AR. in 1842. That also will be erected on next trip to LA. This unmarked grave marking is very inmportant to me. If you have knowledge of an ancestor's grave that isn't marked, please mark it so the next cemetery reading it will be picked up and published in the cemetery book. Now for my sad tale, the morning I was leaving LA., July 1940 with my aunt and uncle, Edward and Birdie Christman, to go to St. Louis to go to school that fall, my favorite little dog got under the wheels of our car and mother backed out and ran over and killed my dog. I believe it hurt her worse than I. I am now retired from the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad (now CSX) in Detroit, Michigan, and have been in Camden, Tennessee for several years doing family research. I am Editor of our Benton County Genealogical Society Quarterly and I volunteer one day a week at our library even though I am handicapped. Researching: KEY, WELCH, ANDREWS, CARLEY, STRANGE, LAWRENCE AND McMURRAIN. CRAIG, CATES, BATEMAN AND TODD. Happy Hunting. # # #