Saturday, March 6, 2021

Toy M Brown Returns to Mt. Pleasant

  ©  Kathy Duncan, 2021

Eeking out information on my own Brown family has been more difficult than my husband's Brown/Johnson line. 

My great-grandfather had a distinctive name: Toy Mansel Brown. However, his initials are a much more common T. M. Brown. It helps to know who his siblings were and who they married. That helped me identify this clipping as pertaining to him.









Not only did my great-grandparents live in Avery, Texas, but they had also both come from the Mt. Pleasant area in Titus county. Toy's half-sister Turie married John Monroe Stephenson. The "new" bit of information is that Toy left the Mt. Pleasant area 21 years before and had not returned since.

Twenty-one years before would have been 1899. Toy M. Brown married Henrietta Elizabeth Kelley in Titus County, Texas on 18 August 1898. In 1900, they were still living in Titus County. My grandmother was an infant then, having been born there in June 1899.

They must have left Titus County shortly after that, so it may have been 

21 years since Toy had been back, but I think that people remember events in epic rather than actual numbers.  I know that my great-grandmother was disowned for having married my great-grandfather. Those hard feelings lasted until my grandmother was six or seven years old. Then my great-great-grandfather became ill, and my great-grandmother packed her bags and went home to see her father. After that, she frequently returned for visits without my great-grandfather. He always said that he did not want to listen to all the Kelley family talk. He said their conversations always went something like "Your Pink, our Pink, their Pink," which suggests that conversation revolved around my great-great-grandfather Pink Kelley. I am guessing that maybe there were still hard feelings. 

By 1925, my great-great-grandfather Mansel Pinkney Kelley was deceased. His wife Eliza was still living with various of her children. Toy's stepfather Leroy W. Laine was deceased as was his mother Mary Emma (Barber) Brown Laine

My guess is that once Toy began to visit his estranged family the visits continued. However, I have not found any more clippings. 


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