Friday, March 9, 2012

my mother's father, James Thomas

aunt minerva collection
The Foster Family by W.T. Foster, cont.

was born on French Broad river, North Carolina, west of Ashville, January 1, 1786 (hard to read) and died in Edgar county,Ill. October 12, 1863. March 12, 1812, he married Elizabeth __________. She was of a Scotch-Irish family and had the noted "Saxon blue eyes." She died early and grand-father did not take another wife. They had three children: John, Barnet and my mother. Barnet, born January 10, 1815, twenty miles west of Cincinnati, in Hamilton county, Ohio. This Thomas family were called Dutch, but there were many kinds of Dutch. The Belgic tribes that occupied old Flanders and from which Belgium took its name, were the ancestors of that Thomas family. There are also Thomas families in Wales, but they are not the ancestors of my mother's family. The Welch Thomases were the ancestors of my mother's family. The Welch Thomases were the ancestors of my father's mother. My mother's ancestors came from that part of Belgium, then in Flanders, where our ancestor Anacher lived 1100 years ago and where, in 1914, those heroic and brave people the Belgians were almost destroyed by the Germans after one of the greatest defenses of the ages. THe ancestors of those Belgians were the ancestors of my mother. The Dutch Boers of South Africa, who did such noble fighting in defending their homes against the British in 1900 are from the same race of Flanders and Belgium Dutch, near where our ancestors Anacher died in 837, A.D. That Thomas family were among the best people I ever knew. Grand-father James Thomas was one of the best men I ever met. Mother's brother, Barnet was to me the best man I ever knew after my father died. He was my friend in my time of greatest need and I am vastly indebted to him for his timely aid and training. He sheltered me and fed me when I was a boy without a home or means of support and having been a member of his family I had ample opportunity of knowing his private life. He was a successful farmer and was one of those preachers who did accept pay for his preaching. He built a church-house for his congregation, the Christian church, also called Campbellites. I was not so well acquainted with mother's brother John. He was a successful country physician and a well informed man. Those two brothers of my mother paid the expenses of her family from Missouri, where we were stranded after father died, to near Paris, Ill. where mother's brothers lived. Those brothers cared for our family till we could take care of ourselves. There are a large number of descendants of those two brothers now living, some in Illinois some in the middle southwest.

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