Happy birthday great-grandmother Annie Elizabeth Williams Webb

A repost again...does that make it a re-re-post?

It's Great grandmother Annie E. Webb's birthday on June 20, so happy birthday great grandmother!

Let's look at the siblings of my grandfather who I never knew, Albert (Bud) Webb, (1891-1919). Bud was the next to youngest of 8 children of Leary/Larry (Leroy) 1857-1921) and Annie Elizabeth Williams Webb (1862-1942).

The photo below shows the Webb feed store, including some gentlemen standing up high.  Weesatche Texas was formerly spelled with the Hispanic form, Huisache.

There's also a blog about my great grandfather, Leroy (Larry, Leary) Webb and his family.

I have looked a bit more at Bud Webb's older brother, John Webb (1880-1938) shared in a repost earlier.

Great grandfather Leroy (or L. F. perhaps) lived with his family in San Antonio at 130 Lewis St. for several census reports. When my grandfather, Albert Bud Webb, signed his draft card in 1917, his address was 96 Lewis St, which is still a small cottage.  At that time he had married my grandmother, and my mother had just been born.

2016 street view of 125 Lewis St, San Antonio, TX  Google image, with some strange coloration through my printer!  There was no 130 Lewis St left (in 2018 on Google) which would have been across the street, but the curved 2 story porch on this house situated on a corner, says that it was thoughtfully created and might have been of the same era. This house now holds offices of a psychological practice.

Grandpa Bud's oldest brother, James Eugene Webb, (1878-1927) married in 1904 to Alvina (Ollie) Albrecht Webb, who had been born in Texas in 1885, and lived until 1971. She had a 4th grade education, and her father Wilhelm came from Germany, but her mother Louise Alwine Dorbritz Albrecht was born in Texas. Ollie was one of 18 children according to the list at Ancestry.  But she and J. E. only had one child.  

Many German immigrants settled in the area of West Central Texas, part of the Mexican and then early Texan effort to have settlers come and make new communities in the mid nineteenth century.

So after James E, the next son born was John Webb (as mentioned in previous posts.)  He and Lizzie had 3 daughters.

Annie and L. F. Webb had a little girl Laura, who only lived 5 years.  Next birth for Annie and L. F.  was Marguerite Ellen Webb Carroll (1883-1951). Her husband also had his name spelled Carrel, and apparently was born in Arkansas.  Marguerite and David William Carroll  had one girl that I know of. He was buried next to my grandfather Bud in the Webb section of the cemetery (see below).

The next youngest Webb was Thomas Ketch Webb, (1886-1959).  When he died in 1959 he was listed as owner of a small cafe in San Antonio.  In 1930 he owned a "Flour and Feed" store. At the census of 1940 he and his wife lived with her parents, and his father-in-law owned a cigar stand and Tom worked for him.  At age 56 he registered for the draft for WW II in 1942.  His wife was Lenora Augusta Bilhartz (Bichortz) Webb, (1896-1972) with either German or Swiss parents.  They had no children. I like knowing that they both returned from Rio de Janeiro in 1947 on a ship, which records include his Brazilian visa and photo.

Tom Ketch Webb 1947

The next Webb child was Clara Belle Webb Bruce, ( 1888-1971) who married Fred C. Bruce (1881-1972).  They had no children. Fred also was a proprietor of a cafe, in the 1930 census.  He lived a year beyond his wife.

And the baby of the family, born in 1905, was L. F. Webb, Jr.   He and his wife, Evelin Lafortune Webb, lived with the senior Webb family in their house (at 130 Lewis St.) in the San Antonio Directory of 1929.   There's also a Social Security claim (undated) after L. F.'s death in 1937 with a daughter Evelin listed, who died in 1999, born 1927.  

But there's a change I just noticed.  After L. F., (a labor foreman for the Missouri Pacific railroad,) died in 1937, Evelin Lafortune Webb married again. I don't have the date, but the census of 1940 shows her tucked into the Shults family living in "rural Beaxar County TX"

So it looks as if her next husband adopted her daughter Evelin, and she became Evelin Shults...and whether others of the family had been from a former marriage of his, or they were born to Evelin Sr., there were 5 children then.  And that wasn't the last of Mrs. Webb Shults.  Her husband Lt. Ray Shults of the US Air Force died in 1980, and she remarried in 1985 to Alphonse Paul Donaubauer, whom she also outlived.  I don't know if she died in 1997, and the Social Security lagged behind, or if she lived until 2000, when Social Security listed her death.

I can only share what's available on Ancestry, after all.  So I'm adding the one child of  L. F. Jr and his wife, Evelin Webb, namely Evelin Webb Shuts, giving the Webb grandparents (L.F. and Annie Webb) 7 grandchildren, one of whom was my mother.

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Some of the Webb and Williams moves

Here's a repost about the travels of the Williams family.

The pioneer spirit

Crab Orchard, KY was near the end of the Logan Trace of the Wilderness Road and was an early pioneer station. There are several mineral springs in the area and from 1827 until 1922 taverns and hotels were located at Crab Orchard Springs

Richard Frederick Williams was born in Crab Orchard in 1782. (see yesterday's post about his family in Missouri and his land grants from having served in the War of 1812.

Wilderness?
The Wilderness Road was the principal route used by settlers for more than fifty years to reach Kentucky from the East. In 1775, Daniel Boone "blazed" a trail for the Transylvania Company from Fort Chiswell in Virginia through the Cumberland Gap into central Kentucky. It was later lengthened, following Native American trails, to reach the Falls of the Ohio at Louisville. The Wilderness Road was steep, rough, narrow, and it could only be traversed on foot or horseback. Despite the adverse conditions, thousands of people used it.

In 1792, the new Kentucky legislature provided money to upgrade the road. In 1796, an improved all-weather road was opened for wagon and carriage travel. The road was abandoned around 1840, although modern highways follow much of its route.

The Logan Trace was a wilderness trail through central Kentucky, a branch of Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road. It was named after its originator, Colonel Benjamin Logan. Logan came over the mountains with Boone in 1775, but went west toward Buffalo Spring instead of north. Its terminus was northwest of present-day Stanford, Kentucky, where Logan built a fort known as Logan's Station or St. Asaph. Stanford eventually emerged from Logan's original settlement.

Richard's son William T. Williams was born Dec. 16, 1824.  *see post about his life.

William moved to Missouri probably in 1832 and with his father's family, various siblings, and uncles and aunts settled there, and began farming. Father Richard Frederick Williams had received a land grant in Missouri for having served in the War of 1812. William T. Williams at 38 joined the US army for part of the Civil War, and then moved much of his family to Texas by 1877, when his daughter Annie Elizabeth (born in 1862) married Leary (or Leroy) Francis Webb, my great grandfather.

These people kept on moving, and I keep feeling amazed at their spirit of exploration.  Texas was pretty wild still in the 1870s, though the Wild West was still to become glamorized in fictionalized paper back books.

The Webbs had been in Texas for a while, since Leary was born (1857) in Clinton County, to parents from Maryland and New York.  He married Annie E. Williams and settled in DeWitt County Texas, where they raised their 8 children (losing one as a child).  The family prospered by farming and then running a feed and general store.

But by 1910 the family was living in the metropolis of San Antonio.  Here was a city environment, where L.F. lived out his years, dying in 1921.  His wife Annie lived until 1942.  But my grandfather died young, Bud Webb was buried in the Masonic Cemetery in 1919 (more about him in another post)

I can only explain my desire to move about the country as the same urge that probably spurred these ancestors to travel to new horizons.  But it sure is a lot easier for me to do so than it was for them.

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