My Grandma Webb...

Della Lena Luke Webb
1887-1959

Moses or Joseph? what was his name? born 1790 or so, he is my gggggrandfather...father to Alexander K Livingston, born 1833 Alabama...who was a traveling man, kids born all over the place, including Hannah Dora Livingston aka Darcina, or Dorcas...born in Louisana? or maybe Arkansas...love the Darcina, since my daughter's name is Darcie, and I had no idea 38+ years ago that Dora/Dorcas/Darcina even existed. It's the things like this that you learn when you work on family history...some good, some not so...but sifting in the records makes the people alive. That's how you keep your loved ones living in your heart, you never stop saying their names.

Dora Livingston Luke was the mother of my grandma...my wonderful, wonderful grandma Webb. Della Lena Luke Webb...married to Shell Martin Webb...my grandpa I never knew. But my grandma! she was 6 foot tall, ramrod straight posture and her hands never stopped, always crocheting, always moving. Hard tough life this woman led, only hints of it coming out as my cousins and I hunt out her life...she was born in Stephenville, Texas, Erath County...where her parents met and married in 1883. Another question...how did James William Luke come to Erath county? The rivers?The Bosque River runs to the Brazos...is that how he came to Erath County? no sign of his family on census, was he a wanderer?

I think he was cruel. Probably raised that way, and left his home to avoid it and then dumped it on his kids. One cousin tells of his son beating his children and wife...locking the wife out when she took her children to church on a Sunday. We each had a picture, only hers, as she received it handed down, had only Dora Livingston Luke in it...our picture from grandma's book had a small boy...the son who grew up to beat his children. All I know is my grandmother cut herself out of every photo she was in with that family. The sisters came to Hunt County TX from Oklahoma once...the story says my grandmother turned away. Family history is not always pretty.

Hard life. I don't know if that describes it...the young Luke family grew rapidly, a baby a year, all girls, until in about 1891 they left Erath county, to go to the land rush in Oklahoma. The next four children were all born in Indian Territory, there in Oklahoma. Dora is a widow by 1900, James William Luke died on the way home from a poker game one night in 1898, his dog came home without him and the family went to search...the winnings of the night gone with the killer who shot him. 1910 finds Dora living with her daughter, Ida and her husband Sam Smith, with her younger children. By 1916, Dora is buried next to her husband in Foster Cemetery.

Della was 19 when she married my grandfather in 1906 and by the 1910 census they had two children, my aunt Bowdy and my dad, Vernon. They were living with her sister, Zora Routon and her husband. They stuck it out there for a while longer, my aunt Lora Mae was born 1912 in Oklahoma. Then they moved their family to Clinton, Hunt County TX where our family had come in the 1880's as pioneers from Lincoln County,Tennesse. Born there in 1924 was my wonderful Uncle Homer Lee, with a twin sister, Oma Dee, who was lost as small baby.

My dad loved his mom. He sent her his recruit picture from Navy Basic training in San Diego...he was barely 16, if that, when he enlisted, and I'm sure money had a great deal to do with that. In the Navy, they called him Tex...and it was his name the rest of his life. After my parents met and married, and the kids started coming, my grandmother lived with my parents across the country and in Newfoundland where I was born. She taught my mom to cook...my mom was a nurse and before that she grew up on a ranch in Idaho. After the death of her father, she joined her only brother in being the caretaker of the outdoor chores. The other sisters took care of the cooking.

I knew my Grandmother Webb as living in Houston, in a boarding house across the street from my aunt Lora Mae. My aunt Bowdy and my uncle Wayne Bates lived up the street. My aunt Lora Mae had those cruel streaks in her as well.I'd like to think she wasn't abused herself, but the things I saw her do when I was a little child makes me wonder where it came from...but she never laid a hand on me. My mother was, after all, my mother...and she would not have ever let me get on that bus every summer and travel to Houston without making sure I was safe there. I would have loved to have heard that conversation!

I remember my Grandmother Webb sitting in her chair, hands flying..and going to the Five and Dime store to buy thread, picking out the colors I wanted to trim my dresser doilies...purple and yellow. yes. I have it still. And I did the embroidery on it myself...my grandma taught me.I remember the fig tree out back and what a great fort it made, and the big tree in Aunt Lora Mae's yard with a big rope swing, that one I fell out of and finally knew what having the breath knocked out of you meant...and my Uncle Buford Sojournor, what a sweet man, how could he have been married to Aunt Lora Mae? He washed his car every single night. The one I remember was about a 56 Chevy, brown and that ivory color they came in. And my Uncle Wayne! He'd take me walking...down to the garage, with the mechanics working on cars...always with a treat for a little blonde girl...and we'd sit a while. Uncle Wayne drank a bit. That's how they said it, you know, the conversations I'd over hear..."he drinks a bit." Uh, yeah. He was married to my Aunt Bowdy....auburn hair, beautiful smile....and she made cream gravy every day of her married life to my Uncle Wayne. Every day!  A love story....

My dad died in 1955 when I was 7...hereditary hemochromtosis we know now...and my Uncle Homer Lee was killed just 6 months later when a car hit him in Las Vegas as he walked along the side of a road. My grandmother Webb outlived four of her children...another son, Franklin Leon, also died as a baby in 1918. I heard someone say when we lost her in 1959 that she died of a broken heart, with her boys gone.

All I knew was I had lost my dad and my grandma...and my mom was so sad, and my brothers running loose...life was very different without them in it.