FAMILY TREE-Marion Allerson Meredith, 1894

I never got to meet this grandfather.  He was a very handsome man, quite brilliant according to my father.  However, he became a violent alcoholic which colored his adult life.  

I found an army letter of commendation because all four of their sons joined the armed forces in WWII.  My father never graduated high school due to joining up, but he was nevertheless able to graduate from college.  Yet, his father's alcoholism wounded him, especially when their mother died when running from another beating and was hit by a car and died in 1945 while all the sons were overseas.  The oldest son Archel who was a career army chaplain was able to tell my dad that their father prayed to ask for forgiveness of his sin before he died of cirrhosis of the liver.  It gave him a little closure to that tumultuous time of his life.

It is said that he married Annie Fairy Stovall when he was nineteen.  Some records show that she was 17, but another that said she married straight out of 8th grade.  Her family often took in the children at Uncle Henry and Aunt Maud's farm.

For most of his life, Marion picked fruit and vegetables, sometimes trucked them to farmers markets which sometimes became a transit situation, sometimes living in tents or inadequate orchard pickers housing.  When Archel was a baby, they heard there were jobs in Colorado so they take a covered wagon all the way there only to find out that there were no more jobs left.  He was born in Bowie, Texas, married in Wheeler, Texas, and also lived in Justice, Texas; my father was born in Plainview, Texas.  He also lived in Curry, New Mexico; Boney, New Mexico; Portales, New Mexico; Roswell, Belleview, New Mexico, and after following the fruit pickers to California, he ended up in Redlands, then Stanislaus, California.  We visited the site of their log cabin in New Mexico where there was an archeologic dig for Native American relics on the property.  It confirmed the story that as children they dug up a stone statue with red jewel eyes.  Of course, their father sold it for liquor.

Marion was a family name.  However, his brother Thorough Luther Meredith-also a family name-was quite unusual a name as well as another brother Rual, and as was his father's name, Julius Cezare Allford Meredith.  His children were named Dollie, Archel, Hershel, Haskel, and Kenneth.