Family
Decoration Day
Contributed by: Cindy, my sister and family historian
Back in 1999, I asked Grandma Dorothy to record some memories. This is her very special memory of Memorial Day about 100 years ago.
After my sisters and brothers were sent to an orphan’s home, I was lost. I stayed with my Grandmother and did the work up in town for people until I guess I was about 13, 14 years old. Then I was staying with my oldest sister, Gertrude, and was working up in town. One summer, we were going to a decoration, we called it. It was Memorial Day, but we called it Decoration Day. We always looked forward to Decoration Day because we got to see a lot of people we hadn’t seen all year. Decoration Day was really a big day for us, a big time of the year. My sister and her husband, Russell, went to a Decoration and at the Decoration, there were a lot of people there from the family.
I met this boy, Doc Gibson. Well, I didn’t think too much about him – he was just somebody out of the family and just kind of talked together, nothing in particular, just being together. When he went home, he wrote me a letter! I thought, “well, he must have liked me a little bit, so I’ll answer his letter.” So, I had his letter laying there and I answered his letter, but instead of putting my letter in the envelope and sending it like I should have, I put the one he had written me in the envelope and sent it back to him. Well, you can imagine my disappointment when I realized what I had done. I didn’t hear from him anymore and I didn’t write to him and apologize for nothing because I didn’t know what to say.
So, next year, when Decoration time came again, he was back down there with his family for the Decoration. So, we met again. Well, this time, I was a little more friendly with him. After he kind of broke the ice and started talking to me and he asked me what happened and I got up enough nerve to tell him it was a mistake that I sent the letter back to him but I didn’t know what to say to him, so I just let it go off like that. So we kind of hit it off together. He liked the same things that I liked to do. Then, when he went back home, he did write to me. We corresponded back and forth for, I guess, it was another year. I know he was graduating from high school that year and he came back to Stearnes with his cousins. It wasn’t a Decoration, he just came back down there.
So, he wanted me to come back to his home with him and meet his family and he wanted me to marry him. I said, “Well, I don’t know about that, you’ll have to ask my mother,” because I was only fifteen years old. I lacked about two months being sixteen years old. That was July and I wasn’t sixteen until September. So he asked my mother if he could marry me and take me home with him to meet his family. Of course, my mother said yes, I guess she was glad to get another one off of her hands – no, not that. But she gave her consent. I went to his home and met his family, which I fell in love with from the very first. I know he had the sweetest Mother that I have ever met. So we planned a wedding. We planned to get married at his sister, Gertrude’s home. She had everything all planned and everything.
We went to get our license at Livingston, Tennessee, the county seat. I guess I told how old I was, I thought I was supposed to eighteen, so I said eighteen. The Judge said, “No, you have to be twenty-one or have your mother or father’s consent or with you.” So we couldn’t get a license there. So we went to another county to see if we could get a marriage license. We went to Selina, a little town not very far from Livingston but in a different county seat. Doc said, “Well, we have to get our story straight before we go in here to get the license.” So, I told them I was twenty-one, but I was only fifteen. We got a license but they told us we had to get married there in that county, we couldn’t take the license out of the county, we would have to get married there. So, we were married on the courthouse lawn by a Justice of the Peace saying the ceremony. And that’s how I was married.
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