James W. Thomas
James W. Thomas was born in Alabama on 8 May 1830 and spent his married life at Douglass, in the pine country of Nacogdoches County in East Texas. On 12 November 1866, in the next county north, he married Mattie A. Spencer, a Mississippi girl of twenty two whose family had been in Cherokee County since she was small. He was thirty six.
Their first child, Annie Adline, was born at Douglass the following August. By 1880 the house held five children: Anna, William, Charlie, Amanda and the baby Caroline. A son James came later. He died on 22 January 1899, at sixty eight, and was buried in the Douglass Cemetery under a stone with two clasped hands and a verse: "A precious one from us has gone, a voice we loved is stilled, a place is vacant in our home which never can be filled."
In 1900 Martha was a widow at the head of the household in the same precinct, with her grown son Charley B. still at home. She told the enumerator she had borne seven children and that six were living. The children stayed within a day's ride of Douglass. Annie married William R. Wortham and lived out her life near Cushing and Lilbert. Caroline married a Ferguson and died at Douglass in 1927. William M. and Charles Benjamin both went a few miles west to Alto in Cherokee County, where Charles worked in the hardware trade and was known as Uncle Bud.
Sources
If James W. Thomas is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "James W. Thomas (1830-1899)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-w-thomas-1830-1899-8950a0.