Shortly after meeting Beulah Hipp for the first time (see the Nov. 22 entry in this blog), I was doing geneaology research one afternoon when a name leaped out at me. Rebecca Wilks married Martin Putnam White on April 4, 1869 and I had begun tracing their descendants. The name of one of their grandsons seem very familiar. In fact, I was sure that the grandson was the patriarch of the While family I had known most of my life. A few text messages and a visit with my high school friends, Johnnie and Brenda White, served to confirm my hunch. A couple of days later Johnnie and Brenda came over to show me the White family history that Johnnie’s brother, Donald White, had compiled some years back. We spent a couple of delightful hours paging through the notebook and the treasures it contains, some of which are depicted below. Donald has since contributed priceless family photos and correspondence to this project.
Marriage License, Martin Putnam White & Rebecca Wilks, courtesy of great-grandson, Donald White.
Martin Putnam White & Rebecca Wilks, courtesy of great-grandson, Donald White.
Having discovered Beulah, and then so shortly after, the connections to the White family, I felt I was on a roll. As Ginger and I continued to flesh out our plans for this project and as I got deeper and deeper into the research, the Wilks, Cagle, and Bonham families of the mid-1800’s became more and more real to me. Connecting with Wilks grandchildren and great-grandchildren intensified that feeling and the goal of finding living descendants of each branch of each family took hold. I was naively enthusiastic about the prospect and that’s when I made the discovery that any more experienced genealogist might have warned me of. The records are spotty, they can be maddeningly silent, they can be tantalizing with possibilities and probabilities that you can’t prove. It would be months before I made another connection despite relentless searching.
In the meantime, Ginger and I had been putting this project web site together. We launched the site on Oct. 8, 2018. Shortly after, I was contacted by a friend who had learned of our project via the web site and our announcement of it in the Fannin County History facebook group. Nancy told me that she was a first cousin, through their mothers, to descendants of the Bonham family, and though none of them lived in the area, they were planning to gather in Bonham in November. Nancy agreed to give Ginger and I a tour of the Bonham family burials in the Willow Wild Cemetery and to try to arrange for us to meet the family while they were in town, plans that worked out beautifully as a future story will detail.
From that point, things began to happen quickly. In mid-October, I was contacted by Julia Cagle Ryder, who had seen one of our project posts and thought she might be related to Martin & Susan Cagle. She and I collaborated on the research that followed, working backwards from her line and searching for ties. The story of her family proved very interesting, and our search will also be the subject of a future post.
In late October, through facebook, I was able to contact Kimberly Wilks Haley, GGG granddaughter of Thomas and Margaret Wilks through their son, Newton Wilks. I was able to share with Kim the pictures and postcards I had received from Donald White, her distant cousin but someone she did not know. The pictures of Thomas, Margaret, Milton, and his sisters are photographs she had never seen (see them here). It was a very rewarding moment for me as these bits of the puzzle came together. Of the five Wilks children who came to Texas with Thomas and Margaret, we now had made contact with the descendants of three.
At about the same time that I made contact with Kimberly, I had reached out to another facebook user who I thought might be the Betty Vick I had heard mentioned as a Wilks family member. I got no response initially and assumed I had been wrong. Just recently, Betty got back to me. She is descended from Thomas & Margaret via their daughter, Julia Wilks Little, adding another branch of the family tree to our living history.
In future posts, I hope to give voice to the family lore of each of these descendants, all of whom have welcomed the work that Ginger and I are doing. A fact that we are eternally grateful for.
Story by Wanda Holmes Oliver.