Ancestors

William Madison Tidwell

William Madison Tidwell was born on 29 May 1866 at Beebe, White County, Arkansas. He was the son of William Madison Tidwell, a Tennessean, and Martha Rebecca Stinson, from Louisiana. By the late 1870s the family had moved to Ellis County, Texas, south of Dallas.

He lost both parents young. His mother died near Ennis in November 1877, at 33, when he was eleven. His father died near Ennis in July 1884, when he was eighteen. Both are buried at Elm Branch Cemetery near Bardwell.

He became a lawyer. By 1895 he had married Laura Blanche Taber, the only child of Edward Dudley Taber, a farmer and army veteran of the Sioux War. Their son, William Edward Tidwell, was born at Ennis on 27 February 1896. Their daughter, Laura Blanche, was born on 11 October 1902 at 301 South Dallas Street, Ennis. At that time the family gave their home as Ferris, a town in the north of the county, and he described himself as a "lawyer, practicing law".

In 1910 the family lived in Waxahachie, the county seat. By 1930 he was back in Ennis. The census that year shows a household of three generations: William and his wife, their daughter Laura, then married to Samuel Dale Myres Jr., their six-year-old granddaughter Blanche Wynnell Myres, and a Canadian-born man named Harry J. McBrierty.

In 1934 he acted as attorney for the estate of his father-in-law, E. D. Taber, with his wife as executrix. In 1940 he filed a delayed birth certificate for his daughter, whose birth had never been registered, and signed it himself at Ennis.

He died on 21 April 1949 at University Park, the town inside Dallas that surrounds Southern Methodist University. He was 82. He was buried in Myrtle Cemetery at Ennis, in the Fourth Addition, in what became the Tidwell family plot. His flat stone reads "WILLIAM MADISON TIDWELL / MAY 29, 1866 / APR. 21, 1949" and carries the cross and crown of the Knights Templar, a Masonic order, with its motto "IN HOC SIGNO VINCES", Latin for "in this sign you will conquer". His wife, his daughter and his granddaughter were later buried in the same plot.

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Cite: Heirology, "William Madison Tidwell (1866-1949)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-madison-tidwell-1866-1949-94c62f.