Oklahoma Family Tree Stories
This beautiful sculpture of three redbud trees is located just outside the Eleanor and John Kirkpatrick Research Center in the Oklahoma History Center. Each leaf of the Oklahoma Family Tree memorializes an Oklahoma family with the family surname, first name(s), and the town or county where they lived. In addition, a short family history is preserved in the digital family history book at the base of the tree. Sponsoring a leaf is a special way to recognize your family history and benefit future generations at the same time. To find out how to honor your own family with a leaf visit the Oklahoma Family Tree Project page.
Reeves Family
Family Tree Leaf
Reeves, Renny, Harli
Oklahoma
The family genealogy is long and convoluted and can be traced back to the sixteenth century. I have selected some of the more interesting characters to share with the readers of this narrative. My history is not unlike many others whose descendants came to America and ended up in Indian Territory.
One descendant, Patrick Magee, emigrated from Belfast, Ireland, in 1771. He landed in Savannah, Georgia, aboard the ship Hopewell. One of his descendants served in the Union army and died at Vicksburg. Others served in the Confederate army, and some were slaveholders. One descendant was killed by a shot from a barn loft over a slave dispute. Another descendant was killed by Comanches when they still menaced the plains.
The family history includes an account of the migration of my great-great-great-great-grandfather Samuel Dawson Sr. Samuel was married to a half-Cherokee lady named Polly Ann Vann in 1804. She was related by marriage to General Sam Houston. Polly Ann was the daughter of Captain John Rogers, an English or Scotsman who fought in the Revolutionary War. Her mother was Alsey Vann, a full-blood Cherokee. She was Captain Rogers’s third wife.
One of their sons (James R. Dawson) became a pioneer physician in Indian Territory, and another (Wilburn Dawson) became a progressive druggist and businessman. Another son, Samuel Jr., had eight children. His oldest daughter, Elisabeth Paralee, married Alexander S. Lewis in 1873. Lewis was a Confederate army veteran and a Texas Ranger under Colonel Bell Burleson. In 1887 they moved to Indian Territory near Tulsa and had six children. Their oldest son, Stephen Riley (Buck) Lewis became an attorney in Tulsa. He was also engaged in real estate and was said to have had a beautiful pioneer home. One account claims that Lewis Avenue, a major street in downtown Tulsa, was named in his honor.
Many of the Dawson descendants were on the Cherokee rolls, and several others settled near Afton, Oklahoma.
My great-grandmother was Martha (Mattie) Watson. She was a true pioneer woman who liked to dip snuff and knew how to make many homemade remedies from herbs and weeds. When she was 15, she married a 37-year-old man named Henry William Watson on Valentine’s Day, 1875. When my grandfather, James Walter Watson, was twelve, he went to the field to take his father lunch and found him dead with an arrow in him. His family thought the real killers were trying to make it look like the Indians had done it. This account has been passed down through the generations but has not been documented.
Walter Watson married my grandmother, Ethel Edna Duncan, on August 20, 1902, in St. Joseph, Missouri. He worked for several packing plants, including nine years for Morris and Company in a region of Oklahoma City called “Packingtown” and now known as the Oklahoma National Stockyards.
My grandmother Ethel Edna Duncan’s father, Uriah T. Duncan, moved from Nebraska to Braman, Oklahoma, in 1920. He bought a quarter section of land for $6,000 and began farming. In 1923, his farm was found to have oil under it. He kept one-eighth royalty for himself and divided the rest among his four children, so my grandmother began receiving sizable monthly checks from the oil company. To this day, his descendants continue to receive those oil royalties.
She and her husband Walter bought a garage in “Packingtown,” and in 1924 they bought a quarter of a block on South Agnew Avenue in the Industrial Addition. It consisted of a service station, ten-car garage, cleaners, and a small home.
They later bought acreage on Northwest 50th Street between what would become May Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue. They had a frame house, which had been in a flood, moved onto the property and remodeled it. It had a deep well for water and a pump which generated electricity before there was electricity in the area. They gave each of their three daughters—Hazel, Edna, and my mother Maxine–lots next door to build a home. This is where I grew up. Three of the four original homes, including the one I and my brother grew up in, still remain on NW 50th Street.
I am proud to be a native Oklahoman.
