Ancestors

John Thomas Blalack

John Thomas Blalack was born on 18 April 1875 in Christian County, Missouri, in the Ozark hills south of Springfield. His father, Julius Blalack, had been born in Carroll County, Arkansas, just over the state line. His mother, Margarett Evans, was a Webster County, Missouri, girl. He learned the blacksmith's trade.

On 22 January 1900, in Douglas County, Missouri, he married Mattie Elizabeth Turner, a girl of sixteen from the hills around Ava. Their daughter Agnes Christine was born at Rogersville on 20 January 1901 and their son George Thomas on 24 May 1903.

For a time the family left the Ozarks. In 1910 they were in Iola, Allen County, Kansas, a cement and gas town in the southeast of the state. The census taker that year listed John Blalack, 34, Mattie, 25, Agnes, 9, George, 6, and Lawrence, born in the months before. Lawrence Jack had been born at Rogersville on 9 January 1910, so the move was probably recent.

They went back to Missouri. John's mother had died in Greene County in February 1910. By the summer of 1912 the family was in West Benton Township, Webster County, near Rogersville. A doctor attended John from 5 to 6 August 1912. He died at five in the morning on 6 August, aged 37 years, 3 months and 19 days. The certificate gives the cause as acute alcoholism, with dysentery of a month's standing as a contributing cause. The informant was Lucinda Johnson of Fordland. He was buried at Kelley Chapel Cemetery near Springfield, where his mother also lies.

Mattie was left with three children between two and eleven. She later married a man named Duke and lived to 101. All three children grew up and settled at Bartlesville, Oklahoma. George died there in 1941, Lawrence, an Army veteran of the Second World War, in 1977, and Agnes in 1984.

If John Thomas Blalack is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "John Thomas Blalack (1875-1912)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-thomas-blalack-1875-1912-fae722.