The Brunsons, Part 1

Mom’s mother’s maiden name was Helen Brunson. Helen’s father, Roy Brunson, was shot and killed at work in Memphis while the rest of the family was in Birmingham in 1935, which was after Helen was married but before Mom was ever born. That was something I discovered when I found Roy’s death certificate online. Mom said she didn’t know about that, but I think Uncle Joe did. I was able to find Roy as a toddler in the 1880 census, living with his parents, J. A. and M. E. Brunson (they were even listed this way on their marriage license, but Roy’s death certificate listed his mother as Mary Steverson, which was close enough to find out that she was Mary Stevens, and find her parents), his brother Cecil, and his sisters Ss. E. and M. E. in Marshall County in the northwestern corner of Mississippi. It was hard to find out much else about that family. Cecil never shows up again in any records and I didn’t even know the names of his sisters. Women are hard to track down since they tend to change their last names when they get married. It was made more difficult because nearly the entire 1890 census was destroyed before it could be microfilmed. Then by the 1900 census Roy had married Velma McCord (they show 0 years married on the census) and they were living in Corinth, Mississippi, where Velma was from. That was about as far back as I could go with Brunsons back in 2014-2016 when I was doing most of my research. I did better with most other branches of the family.

The nice thing about Family Search is it is collaborative, like Wikipedia, so family trees are all public (living people are not public) and can be added onto by anyone and, sometimes messed up or fixed by anyone. Lately Eric has been doing some research so he sent me a text message this weekend asking if I knew that my great grandfather had been shot to death in Memphis. He sent me the death certificate, which I had found before, and a partial newspaper clipping that I had never seen:

I always figured a murder should make the newspaper, but I was never able to look up articles that far back in the Memphis papers. If I ever went to Memphis, I was hoping to look and see. Some newspapers can be searched on the website of the Library of Congress and sometimes you can find things on newspapers.com which you have to buy a subscription for. I think Eric found the article on newspapers.com via his Ancestry account. The article was definitely a confirmation and mentions my grandmother, Helen Grant and the rest of the Brunson family I already knew about. Looking again it also has Roy’s sister, Estelle Rowes of Memphis. That was new! Mom had thought Roy left his wife, and he does not show up in the 1930 census with the rest of his family, so maybe he was just in Memphis the whole time, where his sister lived, and only about 35 miles from Marshall County, Mississippi. The 1880 census showed Roy had two sisters, both with an initial of E. so it fit. Eventually I did find Estelle Rawes in Memphis. She had at least six children according to the 1910 census, but her husband, George, died in 1923. The link was made a little murkier because the marriage record showed George marrying Estelle Jones. Estelle must have married before, but not for long since she was only 24 when she married George. One of her children lists Estelle Brunson as their mother on their death certificate, so I’m sure this is the right person. It turns out that in the 1870 census, before Roy was born, J. A. and M. E. show two kids: Estel and Henry. I don’t think Henry made it and Cecil was too young in 1880 to have been in the 1870 census. Maybe Cecil didn’t make it either. Times were hard. I always figured these people were hard to look up because they led a hard life farming in Mississippi. So much of Mom’s family has all of these really interesting people and events, but the Brunsons were more of a mystery.

Once I had Roy’s sister’s information, I was able to go through all of Estelle Rawes’ children (all first cousins of my grandmother), which took a while, though at least some were already there, but now tied into my family of Brunsons. That was neat to find a big chunk of family not that far back in time. I checked with one of Mom’s Brunson cousins, but she didn’t know anything about the Rawes family. Meanwhile Eric kept digging on the Brunson line and found out a lot more, going much further back. I even found out that Estelle Brunson showed up in the 1870 census again, this time at her grandmother’s house. So that will appear in Part 2.