My great great great great grandfather, Captain William Riddle, was a Loyalist (Tory) in the American Revolution. He was captured and hanged in or near Wilkesboro, North Carolina.

My great great great grandfather, Isaac William Riddle, moved to Texas in 1847, bringing all but two of his 11 children and their children.

Isaac’s twin brother, Joseph L. Riddle and his family, stayed in the Kentucky/Ohio/Indiana area. During the Civil War, all of Isaac’s children and grandchildren, who were of age, with one exception that I know of, fought on the Confederate side. His twin brother Joseph’s children and grandchildren fought on the Union side. It is possible that in some of the battles, Riddle first cousins were fighting against each other.

My great great grandfather, Joseph Pierce Riddle, the one exception, was a Union sympathizer. He refused to grind corn for the Confederate war widows. He was hanged for his trouble during the Sutton-Taylor feud sometime between 1870 and 1873, in DeWitt County, Texas, by the Taylor faction.

John Wesley Hardin, the noted gunfighter, was involved in the Sutton-Taylor feud on the Taylor side. Some of his relatives had married into the Taylor family.

My great grandfather, William Nelson Riddle, was an inventor. In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, he invented, among other things, a dishwasher, an airship (written up in Scientific American), a way to raise sunken ships, a telescope, and an efficient pump for water wells.

Family tradition says that William witnessed a stagecoach holdup near his farm in Johnson County, Texas in the late 1800’s. He saw where the robbers hid the loot. He dug it up and hid it on his property. Weeks later the robbers found out that he had taken it. They came to get it one night. There was a shoot-out in which William wounded one of the robbers’ horses. The robbers got away without their loot and never came back. He died in 1928 without ever talking about the hidden loot. To this day, tales of buried gold on his old property are still being told among us cousins.