A Message for Hurst Family Members April 3, 2005

Composed by Virginia Branch

Each year I try to do some small amount of writing to bring to the Hurst family reunion held the first Saturday in June at Little Hatchie Church at Masseyville. The purpose of this is to present new information acquired over the previous twelve months. Right this minute it appears the year 2005 is going to be quite different from our usual menu. I am out of the loop on this one and will be learning with the rest of you.

I need to take this opportunity to thank all who had a hand in compiling this research on our family. Do any of you have any idea how I am to go about that? I remember Julius S. Hurst of Selmer, Tennessee, as being the original initiator of the project. He was the one who, as far as I know, did the legwork involved in gathering data which constituted the framework on which the rest of us built later. Julius had planned to do a book on the family, but his early demise (1983) in his mid-sixties ruled that out.

Malone McDaniel of Jackson, Tennessee, has always taken an interest in the family story. He married into the family and for many years attended all the reunions. He always had his notebooks and pencil and was busily gathering data. He no longer shows up, and I have heard the reason is arthritis. I recently acquired a book entitled Hurst’s Wurst authored by Kevin V. McCann of Dickson, Tennessee. This book is about Col. Fielding Hurst and his exploits during the Civil War. Kevin gives credit to Malone for sharing all his work on the Hurst family. Most researchers are always willing to share. That’s the name of the game!

We all appreciate Ann Boldger’s contributions. Ann was a granddaughter of Pink Moore and Donie Shields. (You can find them on page 27.) Without Ann’s research and sharing, we would not know much about that line. We no longer have Ann, and I don’t even want to think about that. Her last thought was to help all of her family.

On the cover of Book 2 [available by the end of 2005] of The Hurst Nation is a picture of one of the few remaining early settler’s home places. I have written about this house and its inhabitants many times, and others have used it as subject matter, also, as it has a most interesting background. The lady presently living there is very modest about her contributions to our family story, but she and her family have always called it home and are very proud of their ancestry. Mrs. Cleon Tucker was a Hurst before her marriage and has always lived there in the Nation, most of the time in that particular house. After her marriage, she lived a few years at Henderson, Tennessee, then returned to where she had grown up. She is constantly on call by researchers who have roots in that area. This writer has known her well many years, but still I never know when a new and interesting story will surface.

One such story came up a few nights ago when Cleon and I were engaged in a phone conversation about the old days and how crowded that house must have been during the years when grandparents, parents and seven children were trying to maneuver in its limited area. She said that in those days they had not possessed living room chairs, as we think of them now. They had simple kitchen chairs and, when not in use at meal times, they were transferred back to the fireplace area. When it was time for a meal, her mother would announce, “Dinner is ready, bring your chairs.” All through the years, times and customs have changed. Cleon would rather I not mention her name any more than need be, but to me she is the mover and shaker of this project and I feel the need to acknowledge that fact when saying thank you to the ones who have helped me. Cleon has helped a lot and has connected each of us to others who could help. We can repay her by doing all we can to do the same thing she has done; help anyone we run into who wants to know which road to take.

Then there is Esther Howell, who lives presently in Memphis but who grew up there in the Nation. She has helped us all a million times. Her father was Ervin Young Hurst a son of the Elijah Hurst who was married to Charlotte Redman, known in family annals as Aunt Charity. Ervin was the son of their son, Fielding, who died at an early age of a kidney ailment. Esther has put me up in her home and has hauled me from here to yonder more times than I can remember. Her husband was Jack Howell and he had a most interesting family story, too. He and his father were both drafted into WW2. Both survived and returned home from overseas on the same ship. Jack’s father somehow knew that his son was on the same ship, and he set out to locate him by looking into various rooms until he found one that had Esther’s picture in it.

The first of my three Hurst books was written in 1987, many years ago it seems! When I look through them now I find errors in all of them and it’s very frustrating, but I cannot do much about it. My only consolation is that many of them are clearly mistakes that anyone can see and can tell exactly what happened and what to do about it.

What continues to amaze me is how all these families are so intricately related. I was just looking at a picture of Stanton Hurst and his wife and thinking how they are both related to my grandmother in different ways. His wife, Mary Elizabeth Muse, was a daughter of Emily Smith and Caleb Muse. Emily was a sister to my great-grandmother, Nancy Jane Smith. Caleb Muse is listed among the young men who served in Col. Fielding’s 6th Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry. Stanton, one of the twelve children of David Hurst and Elizabeth Carpenter, was Elijah’s grandson and Fielding Hurst’s nephew.

The Hursts clearly were partial to the name Andrew Jackson. The one discussed on page 24 was one of David’s twelve children and a brother to my great-grandfather. The two of them were in the Confederate army together.

The three Hurst Nation books are rather like a continuing saga. As time passed and word of this work circulated, people would send information and stories on their family members or would make it a point of attending the Hurst family reunion. This big family picnic is a wonderful place to run into long lost kinfolk or at least stories about them. As each book was written, there was just naturally additional information. And yes! we all have lived in and are still living in interesting times!

Somewhere in my ramblings I should say a few words about the early years of my own life. Talk about living in interesting times! If you don’t think it’s interesting to live during a big depression you just try it some time! But no matter what kind of times you live in, it will be apparent that some people handle it better than others. I was born April 28, 1928, to a mother who became seventeen years old three days later. She was very good at dealing with hard times. She told me how she used kerosene to get the lettering out of flour sacks and then hemmed the sacks to make my diapers. She had a married sister, Thelma, who lived in New Orleans and sent her a dozen Bird’s Eye diapers and a diaper bag, which was a rarity in their locale. The bag still had a price tag in it. It cost 39¢. According to Mom, not many babies had store bought diapers. I never hear of the kind of diapers that I wore, and they may not exist these days.

My mom was Hallie Belle Goodman, and she was a daughter of Norman Monroe Goodman and Minnie Belle Hurst. Of course, Monroe Goodman was not really a Goodman. He was an illegitimate son of Elzie Hurst and Lucy Frances Redman. All of those people knew what depressions and hard-times were about. I am very proud of them as I look back on how they coped with the hand they were dealt. The girls all seemed to marry early, and the reason seems to be they all thought life would be better if they had a home of their own. Maybe in some ways it might have been, but life wasn’t easy no matter how you looked at it. Mom married a man nearly twenty years older than her, and I have pieced out my own scenario of how that happened. She had been interested in a young man named Charlie Simpson. The only social life young people had was going to church or simply working together in the cotton fields. Many a girl ended up marrying some fellow she had picked cotton with. Anyway, after church services one Sunday, Charlie asked if he could come see her that afternoon. She was all excited about the expected visit but it didn’t happen. She saw him coming but, to get to their home, he had to walk past their garden. Her mother managed to have business in the garden at that exact time. Mom saw Granny talking to Charlie. After a few minutes he turned around and went his way and never talked to her again. Mom figured Granny had a few words to do with the matter, and she hated her for it. Anyway, Mom soon married my Dad who had been hanging around. It was like a soap opera. Dad was a poker player and always had a little money and dressed better than most of the local yokels. So he got him a young wife.

Dad’s poker playing was an art he said he picked up in the Army during WWI. He wasn’t in favor of working and did very little of it, but his money was a sometimes thing. He would speak of winning streaks and losing streaks but, mostly, I remember when we children looked up and saw him headed home he would always have a big shopping bag and we were always excited to see what he had in it. There would be routine groceries but always some candy, too. I remember a lot of peppermint sticks. We didn’t know for years there was any other kind so we were happy with our red and white peppermint sticks!

I don’t seem to remember much of whatever happened before 1934— the year I became old enough to go to school. I wanted desperately to go to school. I wanted to learn to read and write. The first learning I had along that line was asking some of my elders about what this or that word was on some item around the house. The first words I learned that I recall were “Gold Dollar Mustard!” It’s funny but that is one food I don’t care for at all. I have it in my refrigerator, but I don’t use a good deal of it. It’s a necessary ingredient in deviled eggs, and Ed puts it on some types of sandwiches, but we don’t have to budget for mustard. I remember the prices of food when I was a child and thought nothing of it, but it sure seems odd now when I recall that, on sale days, some stores would have eight small cans of Pet milk for a quarter. The usual price was six cans for a quarter.

Mom didn’t seem to go to the store very much. I still don’t know why, but I remember one time Dad was supposed to buy me two school dresses, and here he comes home with two just alike! Of course she had him take one back and exchange it, but that was a routine all of my young years. Anything we got was purely utilitarian.

Mom and Dad only had four children, and that was all they needed. There were Virginia, Raymond, Dorothy and Houston. We all were totally different. Raymond was mean; Dot was lazy; Houston was laid back and lovable—and, as a little kid, really cute. I lugged him around and loved and spoiled him something pitiful. My sister always said it was because he was all I had to love. I expect it was because he was ten years younger than me! I don’t know what to say in describing myself. I am just me; always got an opinion about everything and maybe I talk too much. But I don’t think I am boring! At least not all that much!

We all lived through WW2, and those were high school days for me and provided my best memories. During the Depression, the folks moved around so much and kept me out of school so much that I was always two years behind and would have been twenty years old by the time I could finish school, so I dropped out of 11th grade. I attended high school at Deering, Missouri, and remember exactly where I was when we heard about the first atomic bomb being dropped. I was at the pump getting a drink. We had one of those old pitcher type pumps. We knew the war was about over. I was seventeen years old and, if I had been a boy, the Army would have been wanting me in one more year! I would have made a terrible soldier. They would have had me in that famous awkward squad half the time.

The War, with all its talk of rationing and shortages, didn’t touch our lives very much. The only thing we couldn’t get that I recall was washing powder. And that wasn’t a big deal around our house anyway.

There do not appear to have been any dull years in the existence of my life. Always there was some dread problem hanging over our heads, as during the Cold War years. And these times we are dealing with now are a totally different bill of goods.

Whatever mistakes any of you find in Book 1 you will maybe be able to correct when you read Books 2 and 3. Or, in some cases, maybe I did just get some wrong information. That can happen and, always, human error will be with us.

There is one thing for absolute certain—there are far more Hursts out there than we or anyone else can ever keep up with. And they spell their names many different ways. Of course, that is true of all families, even Smith, which seems such a simple name. But, in early times when surnames were evolving, many people had little or no education and they spelled names any way that sounded right to them.

Paragould, Arkansas

April 5, 1987

Dear Family,