Morgan-Martin-Pile-Porter Family of Texas
| Six weeks before I was born in 1951, my mother’s mother died, too young.Just after my second birthday, mother’s father followed and so, I have no memories of them except from photographs and from stories my mother, her sister and my one cousin have told me.A very beloved great-aunt had also once engaged a professional genealogist to trace a single line of her family back into the 18th century so she could apply for membership in the DAR.By the time I was born, my father’s parents had “retired” and were living on Granddad’s land reclamation project, the Ten Bar Ranch in northeast Tarrant County, Texas.Though they both died before my sixteenth birthday I have plenty of memories on that side.I remember their kindness to me.I remember Granddad sitting me on the back of his prize bull, “Rupert,” and coming out in the pick-up or the tractor to rescue us the countless times my Dad got the Jeep stuck in some soft spot.I remember how Grandma always kept homemade fruit juice Popsicles for us in the deep freeze on the back porch.Since the Ten Bar was easy driving distance from Dallas we went there often, my family, my uncles and aunts and cousins, and always especially on Christmas Eve. My grandparents had four sons, and I was the tenth of fourteen grandchildren born within in a span that stretched twenty-five years.Though many of us have lived in a number of states over time, it seems that now I am the one who lives at the greatest distance from the place of my childhood memories.Who knows?Maybe that’s why the genealogy bug bit me.Family history as the maintenance of family ties.At any rate, I have enjoyed the process of discovery and want to share what I’ve found with my cousins on both sides, and with all our children, and theirs.I could not have done this without the help of a number of them, or without the recollections of my surviving uncles.I’ve also been pleased to make the acquaintance of numerous more distant cousins in the process.Their information and help has been both gracious and priceless.I welcome the chance to know more of them. This is, and probably always will be, a work-in-progress.When I began I only had a bare bones copy of the lineage my mother’s aunt had commissioned and the knowledge of when and where each of my grandparents had been born.Beyond that there was only a very large blank.Now, obviously, there is a whole lot more giving glimpses into every period of American history, and, in a few cases, pre-colonial European.Even so, there are plenty of gaps, intriguing possibilities, downright mysteries, and frustrating brick-walls.Some early ancestral lines from both the Martin and the Pile families have been omitted at this time due to the limits of the web page. After twelve years of on-again off-again research, I have stacks of stuffed file folders, random notes tucked away here and there, and I kick myself for not always recording the source citations as I entered data into my software program.I ask the reader’s patience while I go back over territory already covered and tediously update both my program files and this site with the documentation it needs.But if I don’t get this started… | Morgan-Martin-Pile-Porter Family of Texas Updated September 30, 2002 |
Brett Porter Morgan | |
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