Lives Between the Dimensions

For Our Courageous Grandmother, Mahala If you had asked me who Mahala Ward Tarlton was 20 years ago, I would have had no idea.  Once, when we had a family reunion in the Old Greenville, Missouri historic park, I remember my brother and I walking through the old cemetery by the St. Francis River and one of my aunts mentioning we had some Carltons or something similar in our family tree, and that we might find one of their headstones as we strolled through the repository of remains of Wayne County's early citizenry.  It was not to be, of course. My mother had told me, several times, the story of one of one of my grandfathers being murdered during the Civil War.  The story and the details of the cowardly act upon my ancestor remained vivid throughout all the years of my adolescence  but a busy career and a family that included three sons kept the name in obscurity until well into my late 40's when my fascination began with with my ancestry in earnest.. B...

INTRODUCTION:  I remember Uncle "Doad", as he was called by family, only in the infirmity and decline of his senior years.  Theodore Roosevelt Moore was the last male heir born to Civil War and Plains Wars soldier Daniel Moore, by his last marriage to Susan Ann Tarlton.  Ted Moore had two sisters by this marriage, Bessie Edith Moore Wilson and Essie Anna Moore Dees. He recalls a pretty thorough list of all the families living in the general Rucker and Moore Communities in the early 1900's.  But of special interest to the reader might be the anecdotes he recalls of Rucker School, working a cowhide for shoestrings, and meeting at a neighbors house to make tasty treats. His contributions to the Rucker Cemetery and improvements he personally undertook are recalled but in no measure reflect the weeks, days, and hours he personally devoted, the sweat and manual labor, that were expended, to improve the cemetery in large part to what we know today.  It was a l...

 Jacob William Ragan (1894 - 1972) Jacob William "Poppa" Ragan 1963 I remember my grandfather as "Poppa" and grandmother as "Momma". Poppa was born July 21, 1894 in Toone, Hardeman County, Tennessee to Nathaniel Francis Ragan and "Nannie" Nancy Catherine McClendon Ragan, the fifth child of the ten children of this union. After his mother's death in 1906, his father remarried to Maggie Loney McCoy, and he was to share biscuits with yet another six half-brothers and one half-sister.  He was named for his maternal great-grandfather, Jacob McClendon, believed to have been properly Jacob William McClendon. His father Nathaniel was a very successful man, owning vast acreage of farm and timber, and substantial numbers of beef cattle.  Hundreds of acres were always in cotton.  He owned meat markets and grocery stores in Hardeman and Madison County, Tennessee to market his own as well as neighboring farms produce.   Unlike his ow...