Beyond Fiction

I’m enjoying writing this series about my “Elusive” ancestors. Strangely, it seems that my writing of these posts is motivating me and helping me to find more info about the “elusive” person!

Today, I’d like to share what I have found. I mentioned in my last post that I had made great strides in finding some of Martin’s descendants. I feel confident that I am getting closer to the point where I may be able to make contact with a living descendant and perhaps discover some much needed information about my great-uncle! It’s one thing to find names and places and such but I have been fortunate to find more than that. I’ve actually been able to find some stories and some obituaries lately. Of course, sometimes we are surprised by what we find and sometimes we are even saddened!

I must say that I have found the Historical Newspaper Collection on Ancestry to be very helpful to me in this endeavor. It isn’t always feasible to use this collection because a lot of the places my ancestors have been are not covered by this collection. This was one of the rare exceptions. Martin’s granddaughter, Stella (Ferguson) Hicks, and her family lived in the Brownsville, Texas area and also in the San Antonio, Texas area. Ancestry’s newspaper collection was very valuable because they had the local newspapers for this area. Here is a list of some of the items I found and will share with you all in the next few posts:

• Obituary for James E. Ferguson, Martin’s grandson.
• Obituary for George Hicks and Stella (Ferguson) Hicks
• Newspaper article concerning George and Stella (Ferguson) Hicks
• Newspaper article concerning Billy Ferguson and Kenneth Hicks (son of George and Stella)
• Another newspaper article concerning George and Stella (Ferguson) Hicks

As I said, the obituaries were able to give me some helpful information about family members. The other articles are the kind that when you see them you just have to say “Wow!” The thing about researching your family history is that you have to take the good with the bad and in this case there are a couple of very sad articles.

I won’t post the actual images of the articles because I don’t want to get into any kind of trouble. You remember all the uproar last year, right? Instead I will transcribe them and share them with you. For that reason it may be slow coming but it will come eventually.

I hope you will enjoy my sharing them with you!