Mr and Mrs Jake Spangler

My grandmother's parents, Columbia DeShields Spangler and Jacob Spangler, died when my grandmother was quite young. The story she told me was:

Her Mother was very sick with something people get then and really don't now like TB or smallpox or scarlet fever or something. My grandmother was being cared for by a neighbor. They brought my grandmother back home and told her to say goodbye to her Mother because she didn't have much longer to live. After she died, her Father staggered into the front yard said, "I can't live without her, I just can't live without her" and dropped over dead. One of their sons lived some distance away and was coming home on the train. He read about the death of his parents in some newspaper before he ever got home. I think about that sometimes when I read in the paper, "Names withheld pending notification of family."

When I went home that day and told my Dad what she had said he was very surprised. My Grandmother rarely talked about it. My Dad said when he was growing up they had to go to church every Sunday but Mother's Day. Back then they gave out white or red flowers based on whether your Mother was still living or not.

My grandmother went to live with her second oldest brother, 21 years her senior. I always knew where she lived, I never thought about where her two brothers went to live. I found them on the census with their oldest brother. My grandmother always said if her brother hadn't taken her in, she would have gone to the Buckner Orphans Home (www.buckner.org).

I tried to find the story in the Sherman paper but there was a fire and there are no microfilmed papers from those years. I did find the story in both Dallas papers. The State of Texas does have a death certificate for both of them. Her cause of death in pneumonia, (which isn't exactly what my Grandmother told me.) And his is apoplexa, which I had to look up and it means like a stroke.

See the next post for the newspaper articles.

Amy