May 26, 2020
A story from Don Jackson’s youth.
Family Stories Are Not Always True
My grandmother (Grannie), Isla Ward Buster, was born in 1900, one of eleven children, on a farm in central Texas. The last thirteen years of her life, she lived with me and my family. Although she told us many stories of her upbringing and family tales, the one she told many times really captured our interest.
Her grandfather, my great-great grandfather, John Thompson Jacks, came to Texas from Alabama and settled on land in Hayes County, Texas. The story she told us was that Granddaddy Jacks joined the Confederate Army early in the war and made it through the war without a scratch. However, Grannie told us that at the end of the war, he rode and walked back to Hayes County only to be shot and killed, before he reached his home, by a neighbor with whom he had feuded prior to the war. This was the story that Grannie had heard throughout her life.
In 1984, while conducting business in Austin, I decided to drive over to nearby Hayes County to see if I could find the graves of the Jacks family. I knew the name of the cemetery and had no problem finding it. As I walked through the iron gate, the plots for John Thompson Jacks and his wife, Leah Abigail McGonagill Jacks were on my immediate right, Now this was before digital photography but I took a couple of snapshots of their tombstones. To my surprise, the date of death of G-G-Granddaddy Jacks was April 29, 1882. Seventeen years after the end of the Civil War.
When I arrived home late that evening and told Grannie what I discovered, her first reaction was anger claiming “someone has changed the stone!” Later, her anger turned to disappointment. Disappointment that the story she had believed all of her life was just that, a story.
Now it may be that he was shot and killed by a neighbor but I’m still researching that. I do know that he fathered four children before the war and another four after the war, one of whom was my Great Grandmother.
Submitted by Donald L. Jackson