| Our Family Ties |
| Addie Sylvania Lawson |
real name Adalaid Addie Sylvania Lawson, the wife of E.M. McGinnis and the mother of Rex Oral McGinnis, was perhaps a little sentimental. She saved many of the letters she received, noting that one was the first letter her son Rex wrote after he turned 21. Her real name was Adalaid, and in the early 1880's, before she was married, letters came to "Ada Lawson [or Adda]," at White Oak or Tollgate, WV. Some of her relatives then were still Seventh Day Baptists, a denomination that is long gone in Ritchie County. Her cousin Rev. M.D. Pritchard wrote in 1883, "Addie, I hope that you have become a Christian ere this, if not I would say to you to seek the pearl of great price." A former teacher began one letter in the 1880's, "Dear Adda, are you a Christian?" But her cousin Nannie Lawson, a schoolteacher, wrote gossipy letters about young men. Les Lovejoy King remembers Addie as "sort of stout and squatty and always smelled of sweat when she kissed you." Addie had excellent, brown teeth. Like many women of her time, she sometimes enclosed pieces of her dresses with her letters, presumably to give her family and friends an idea of what the dresses looked like. She sewed heavily and reliably. Her daughter Kittie's college letters in 1907-1908 were full of requests for clothes, specifying particular features and fabrics, unlike Kittie's apologetic requests to her father for school money in those same letters. In 1907 she wrote to her son Rex in Houston from 1508 E. 14th Street in Austin (probably visiting her parents Elmina and Salathiel Lawson), "Let me hear from you. Hope you are not all washed away." real name Adalaid !MARRIAGE:Irma McGinnis Dotson, Our McGinnis Family, 2nd edition, 1994; ; ;Addie and E.M. McGinnis were some of the first residents of Katy, living six miles to the south. The town was plotted in 1895, a post office established the next year, and the first rice planted the year after. Seventy years before they arrived, the Karankawa Indians were still hunting buffalo there. Katy's 5th Street was once part of the San Felipe Road to Stephen F. Austin's colony in the 1830's. Formerly the Cane Island stagecoach stop, Katy got its name from the Katy railroad line. Its population in 1950 was 849. The two story "old home place" was never painted within Les King's memory. The west end of the porch was covered with honeysuckle or morning glory vines, and filled with bumblebees. The other side of the house was planted in four o'clocks. Bois d'arc trees served as a windbreak. Enoch had a typewriter in his little office, and Addie had a pump organ in the parlor which she played. For the children, she would sing a song beginning "One day an old kitty cat climbed up in a tree" to catch a bird. But the bird convinced the cat that she needed to wash before eating, so took the opportunity to flee. The house was lit with kerosene and there was no running water or indoor plumbing. They didn't even have an icebox until the Lovejoys took one there. Before the grandchildren went to bed, they had an evening meal of cold leftovers. Addie made butter, and her own laundry and dish soap. The family used store-bought soap for bathing. The kitchen of this house was later moved to Seven Oaks in Katy. In 1913, Addie was in St. Mary's WV being treated by Enoch's sister and brother in law Melcena and Dr. Grimm. Les King remembers a family trip with Addie about 1919 to visit relatives in Austin, riding in the Lovejoy's Model T Ford. In 1934 Addie visited her sister Mord in Moses, NM as part of her son's family trip out west. Near the end of her life, Addie moved in with her son Rex and grandchildren Maureen and C.D. McGinnis. But as she got older, she suffered from senile delusions and finally died in a Houston nursing home in 1944. She and Enoch, as well as their children Rex and Kittie, are buried in the Katy cemetery on Franz Road. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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