Bond of Charles Brooks and John Stewart, 24 January 1823, for Charles’s marriage to Deniah Cornelius, see Lawrence County, Alabama, Marriage Bonds and Licenses 1820, available digitally at FamilySearch
Or, Subtitled: Wherein I Confess That I’ve Made a Whopper of a Mistake, about Which I Need to Tell Readers of This Blog
I need to start this posting with a confession. I make mistakes. I know that will shock you profoundly[!]. In working on this posting, I discovered I have made a colossal one, one that reverberates through previous postings about my Brooks family. Finding that I have gone wrong about one key piece of information will now require me to backtrack through previous postings and correct multiple erroneous statements based on one big wrong turn.
Frank W. Johnson, A History of Texas and Texans, vol. 3 (Chicago and New York: American Historical Society, 1916), p. 1468
Or, Subtitled: “A life-long Mason, a Methodist, and a staunch Jeffersonian democrat…he took little stock in national prohibition, nor in woman’s suffrage. He deplored ‘a short-haired woman’ or a ‘crowing hen!’”
The following posting continues my series about the children of James Brooks and Nancy Isbell of Wayne County, Kentucky, Warren County, Tennessee, and Lawrence County, Alabama. This posting focuses on their 11th child, Charles Wesley Brooks.
Tombstone of Lieut. J.W.S. Brooks, see Find a Grave memorial page of J.W. Brooks, Davis Chapel cemetery, Alpha, Clinton County, Kentucky, created by Kyroots, with a tombstone photo by Judy Reneau.
Or, Subtitled: Military Enlistment Cards Capturing Physical Descriptions — Blue Eyes, Fair Hair and Complexion, 6’2″ Tall
This post is a continuation of a series of postings about the children of James Brooks (1772-1835) and Nancy Isbell of Wayne County, Kentucky, Warren County, Tennessee, and Lawrence County, Alabama. To see previous postings in this series, click on the “previous posting” link at the bottom of this posting, and then continue doing that with each posting that pops up until you reach the link I just provided above. The following posting focuses on James and Nancy’s tenth child, John Wesley Stewart Brooks:
The names and birthdates of the children of James Brooks and Nancy Isbell are recorded in the family bible that passed to their son James Irwin Brooks (or, as I have suggested previously, it’s possible the bible actually belonged to James Irwin Brooks and he transcribed the information found in his parents’ bible into his own bible). Information about this bible is found in the two postings I’ve just linked and also here. Digital images of the transcript of the bible register published by Memory Aldridge Lester after she saw the original bible in June 1951 at the house of its owner, Nettie Raymond Brooks Young of Moulton, Alabama, are in the first posting linked above.
Children of Alexander Cobb Lindsey and Mary Ann Green at 1953 family reunion: front, l-r — Sam, Robert, Ed, Veta; back, l-r — Dennis, Clarence, Bloomer, Emma, Emmitt, Camilla
Or, Subtitled: “The fourth generation was represented, and there were 87 present”
As the previous posting, to which this posting is a footnote, indicates, the 1910 federal census states that Alexander Cobb Lindsey and Mary Ann Green had thirteen children,[1] but the birth and death register of their family bible, of which the posting I’ve just linked provides pictures, lists the names and birthdates of only twelve children.[2] The birth entries for all children except the last child of the couple, Emmitt, are in the handwriting of Alex C. Lindsey. No family records that I have seen provide the name of a thirteenth child.
The children of Alex C. and Mollie Green Lindsey are as follows:
Alexander Cobb Lindsey and wife Mary Ann (Mollie) Green Lindsey, 1930s, Coushatta, Louisiana; photo in possession of Marilyn Lindsey Cope
Or, Subtitled: “A Man of Service to Humanity in Red River Parish, Louisiana,”“Don Quixote Attacking a Spinning Windmill“
Alexander Cobb Lindsey, the seventh child of Mark Jefferson Lindsey and Mary Ann Harrison, was born 10 March 1858 in Union Parish, Louisiana, and died 22 January 1947 at Shreveport, Caddo Parish, Louisiana.[1] His tombstone in Old Armistead Chapel Methodist cemetery at Coushatta, Red River Parish, gives his name as “Dr. A.L. Lindsey,” as does his obituary in the Shreveport Times newspaper on 23 January 1947.[2] The tombstone, which was erected by his children for both Alex Lindsey and wife Mary Ann Green Lindsey following his death, incorrectly gives his date of death as 6 February 1947.[3]
A photo of Benjamin Dennis Lindsey at the time he was elected sheriff of Bexar County, Texas, in 1908; the original apparently hangs in the county courthouse, and is reproduced in Robert W. Stephens, Texas Ranger Sketches (Dallas, 1972), p. 84
Or, Subtitled: “Adventure Seeking Benjamin Dennis Lindsey,” “By Any Man’s Gauging a Gentleman’s Gentleman”
Benjamin Dennis Lindsey, the fourth son (and fifth child) of Mark Jefferson Lindsey and Mary Ann Harrison, was born 21 January 1856 in Union Parish, Louisiana. He died 2 May 1938 in San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas.[1] His biography by Clarence Wharton in Texas Under Many Flags states that his parents were Mark J. and Mary Ann Harrison Lindsey, the father a native of Lawrence County, Alabama, and the mother of Talladega, Alabama.[2] According to the biography, the Lindsey family came early to the South from England,[3] and Mark J. Lindsey was a planter in Alabama, who moved to Louisiana and assisted widows and orphans during the Civil War. Wharton states that Mark J. Lindsey died in Red River Parish in 1876 (1878 is correct) and Mary Ann Harrison Lindsey in 1875 (1877 is correct).
Tombstone of Emma C. Lindsey Wester, Provencal cemetery, Provencal, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana; photo by William Foley is from her Find a Grave memorial page
Or, Subtitled: Mysteries and Incongruities Piled Atop Each Other
Emma C. Lindsey was the fourth child of Mark Jefferson Lindsey and Mary Ann Harrison, and their only daughter — though, as the last posting notes, a grandson of Mark and Mary Ann, Aaron Bloomer Lindsey, stated in an August 1959 interview in the Coushatta Citizen newspaper that his grandparents had twelve children, and all accounts I have seen of their children include only nine children.[1] If A.B. Lindsey’s information is correct, Mark and Mary Ann may have had three children who died as infants, whose names no one among their descendants seems to have recorded, and those three children might well have included another daughter.
Mark Jefferson Lindsey in 1870s; photo is reproduced in Henry C. Lindsey, The Mark Lindsey Heritage (Brownwood, Texas, 1982), p. 46; original in possession of John Ewan Kellogg, Coushatta, Louisiana, in 1980s
Or, Subtitled: The Lure of the New Cotton Frontier in Northwest Louisiana Prior to the War
In my last posting, I told you of a letter my uncle Henry C. Lindsey (Carlton to his family, but Henry professionally) sent me on 18 November 1980, in which he recounted what several elderly relatives he had just visited in Coushatta, Louisiana, told him about the move of Mark Jefferson Lindsey and wife Mary Ann Harrison to Louisiana in 1849 or 1850. These relatives told my uncle versions of stories I myself heard a number of times at the annual family reunion of descendants of Mark and Mary Ann in October each year in Red River Parish.
Pen-and-ink drawing of Mark Jefferson Lindsey from “an old family bible,” reproduced in Henry C. Lindsey, The Mark Lindsey Heritage (Brownwood, Texas, 1982), p. 3
Or, Subtitled: Migration of Alabama Families to Northwest Louisiana, Late 1840s and Early 1850s
Establishing Mark’s Birthdate
In the bible of his sister Frances Rebecca Kellogg, Mark Jefferson Lindsey recorded his birthdate, stating that he was born “in the year 1820 Oct the 9,” son of D. and Jane Lindsey. Above the diary entry, Mark has written the date on which he made this record: “December the 4 1853.” We’re able to know that Mark himself wrote this entry since his handwriting matches that of other documents he wrote. In the signatures of Mark below, note the stylized J, for instance, with the loop running back through the top of it, and the stylized capital M. The first is from a 15 September 1838 deed of trust between Jacob H. Huffaker and John M. Davis in Oakville, Lawrence County, Alabama, for a debt Huffaker owed Davis, with Mark signing as trustee.[1] The second is Mark’s signature as he gave bond on 19 October 1839 for his marriage to Mary Ann Harrison in Lawrence County.[2] The birth record for Mark in his sister Frances Rebecca’s bible is, it’s easy to ascertain, written in the same hand — by Mark himself.
Begats and Bequeathals 