talkingroots: Memories too precious to lose

Following a recent local genealogical society meeting, I was thinking about what is lost forever when a person dies. I feel fine, but I wanted to get down some things of which I am likely the last keeper. Otherwise, when I go, they go.

The first was a memory of my Dad and namesake, Deason Hunt. As we walked among the tombstones of Hunt Cemetery in eastern Rusk County, Texas, he was telling some of his memories. At the stone of his Aunt Lou Vicey Hunt Ables (1846-1922), Dad recalled her funeral. He was 12-years-old at the time. At the cemetery, the coffin was opened for viewing before burial. It was snowing that cold December day, the 17th of December. It is likely my granddaddy Joseph Lafayette Hunt was there unaware that in an odd circumstance, he would die exactly 27 years later on December 17, 1939. My Daddy remembers as he looked into the coffin, a snow flake fell upon his Aunt’s cheek appearing as if a tear.

Years earlier, Daddy recalled, that, as a child, he was allowed to feel the bullets still carried in his leg from the Civil War by his grandfather, Thomas Edmond “Buck” Fears. This would have happened no later than when Daddy was 5-years-old because that was his age when Buck died in 1915 in the Hunt home. Daddy’s sister, Gladys Jewel Hunt Stewart, remembered in 1978 that Daddy woke up that night and asked “what’s happening.” When told what had happened by his mother, he said that “old Buck wasn’t dead.”

More memories will appear on this blog as time goes by.

Source: talkingroots.wordpress.com