Theodore Freelen Howell
Theodore Freelen Howell was born on 4 April 1832 in McNairy County, Tennessee. He signed his name T. F. Howell, and that is how the papers of Burnet County knew him for sixty years. His family came to Texas about 1838, when he was a small boy, in the years when Texas was its own republic. His memorial gives his parents as Walter Howell and Nancy Ann Lawrence.
He married twice. His first wife was Dorcas Mary Graham, whom he married on 11 January 1854. She left him a son, Walter Andrew Howell, and died young. On Christmas Day 1855 he married Nancy Elizabeth Sellers in Colorado County, on the lower Colorado River. The county clerk had issued the license on 14 December to "Theodore F. Howell and Miss Elizabeth Sellers," and P. B. Chandler, a minister of the gospel, married them. They were married for forty-nine years, and she died on Christmas Day 1904, forty-nine years to the day. Her obituary said so in exactly those words: "they having been married forty-nine years to a day when Mrs. Howell died."
They had seven children, and five outlived their mother: Isaac Green Howell of Runge, Martha Jane, wife of a Watson, of Gano, Nancy Ella, wife of Finis Richmond Keele, of Burnet, Robert Theodore Howell of Lake Victor, and the doctor of the family, Asa William Richard Howell of Burnet, known as Dr. A. Howell. Nancy Ella was born at Goliad in January 1867, so the family was then living in the coastal country south of San Antonio. They were still there in 1876, when T. F. Howell of Weesatchie, a settlement in Goliad County, sent his subscription money to the Christian Messenger, a Church of Christ paper printed at Bonham. Elizabeth also raised Walter, the son of his first marriage, who later lived at Clifton.
In the Civil War he enlisted in Company D of the 8th Texas Infantry, a Confederate regiment that served mostly on the Texas coast, at Corpus Christi and along the Gulf.
By the 1890s the Howells were settled in Burnet County, in the hill country northwest of Austin. Elizabeth's last illness lasted nearly five months, and all of the children came home during it. She died "surrounded by her husband, children and friends." Theodore outlived her by thirteen years. He died at Burnet on 18 January 1918, aged 85, and was buried beside her in the Cauble Cemetery near Lake Victor. His stone is a tall shaft topped with a carved dove and the word HOPE.
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Cite: Heirology, "Theodore Freelen Howell (1832-1918)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/theodore-freelen-howell-1832-1918-d2d833.