A Matrilineal Adventure

We have launched another Adventure with Ancestors! On this trip, my husband, dog and I are following my matrilineal line back through time (I wish!) and eastward across the southern US.

I am not sure when my interest in my mother’s mother’s mothers began. Maybe it was when I learned about a silver spoon that has been passed down in my family from oldest daughter to oldest daughter. I thought it was so cool and I was disappointed that I was not in the line of succession, though I didn’t blame my mother for being born second. :)

My interest may have also come from the fact that I come from a long line of strong women – many of whom pushed boundaries of what women were “supposed to do” at the time. 

My own mother, Jane, has been deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement since the 1960s. In the 1970s, when I was a teen, she went back to school, earned an MSW and became a working mother. As is true with many of the strong women in my history, my mother had a supportive husband. My father stepped in to help with child-rearing so my mother could work full time and not have to “do it all.” Her desire to help others continued and later in life, as a breast cancer survivor, she wrote and self-published a book about her journey in hopes of helping other newly-diagnosed patients with their treatment decisions and journey.

Mary Virginia Bedichek

Jane’s mother, Mary (my grandmother), earned an MD and was delivering babies as a young doctor in the 1930s before becoming an anesthesiologist and putting her husband through medical school. She eventually chose to leave medicine to focus on raising her four daughters. 

Lillian Lee Greer

Mary’s mother, Lillian Lee Greer (my great-grandmother), attended the newly-established University of Texas, graduating in 1903. After several years of teaching, she took a chance and followed a suitor she’d dated on and off after college, Roy Bedichek, to Deming, New Mexico in 1910. They married, built a cabin on a homestead claim and had two daughters before returning to Austin, Texas. (Learn about their adventure here.) She continued her career as an educator and administrator, as well as writing a Spanish textbook that was used throughout Texas. Lillian was also involved in launching a maternal child health clinic in Austin that became Central Texas Planned Parenthood. Like her husband, Lillian loved to write and wrote many unpublished plays and several published short stories.

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Last fall, I traveled to Louisiana for an impromptu family reunion at my aunt’s in Pineville. My mother, father, Mom’s two other sisters and many of my first cousins converged on the small ranch house near a grove of piney woods. My Pineville aunt is a Texan through and through, but coincidentally, early in her marriage, she and her husband moved to this Louisiana hamlet halfway between two ancestral locations. Though Lillian Lee Greer (my aunt’s grandmother and my great-grandmother) spent most of her life in Texas, she was born in 1885 an hour and a half north of Pineville in Keatchie (aka Keachi). Lillian was the second of seven children, though was actually the eldest child growing up since the first born died in infancy.

One hour south of Pineville, Lillian’s mother, Virginia Lestrappes Lee was born in 1859 on her parents’ sugar cane plantation near Opelousas. She was the eighth of ten children and until age five, lived on a plantation with enslaved people. During the Union Army’s Red River Campaign in 1864, five-year-old Virginia’s family moved north to Mansfield, Louisian. After the Civil War, they moved to nearby Keatchie.

Virginia LeStrappes Lee

Teen-aged Virginia attended Keatchie Women’s College and soon after, met and married James Frances Greer from Kentucky. Virginia and James moved westward across Texas as James’ career advanced through university teaching and administration positions. They eventually landed in Waco, where James first taught then accepted the position of interim Vice President of Baylor University. In 1907 at the age of 48, he died in a buggy accident. Driving a buggy with his daughter Lillian sitting next to him, his horse began to run and he was unable to maintain control while trying to avoid a collision with another buggy. Lillian was thrown and suffered minor bruising but James hit his head hard on the ground and died shortly after. Oddly, I didn’t really know this story until after moving away from my childhood home of Waco. I probably drove through the intersection of Speight Ave and 7th Street dozens of times, having no idea my great-great-grandfather had met his demise right there.

Suddenly, James’ widowed wife Virginia had to find a way to support herself and four school-aged children. She built and ran a boarding house for young male Baylor students. She became known as “Mama Jennie” and was sort of a local celebrity at Baylor.

Lillian Lee Greer was extremely proud of her mother, Mama Jennie, and spent years researching and writing a biography of her mother. I have her typed pages of numerous versions, as she worked and reworked the story. I also have pages and pages of handwritten notes she took while conducting extensive research so she could tell the story enveloped in historical context, as well as beautifully detailed descriptions of the Louisiana landscape, flora and fauna. I plan to do my best to edit and combine the multiple versions and share the book. I enjoy Lillian’s writing very much and think she was quite talented. Several of her short stories were published during her lifetime. 

While in Louisiana, I visited the county clerk’s office in Opelousas. As I giddily read the original documents from the 1850s about my great-great-grandmother Virginia’s parents, John Bachman Lee and Sarah (Sally) Elizabeth Harwell Lee, I realized my great-grandmother Lillian had poured over these exact documents while in Opelousas researching her mother’s childhood and formative years. While I was able to secure digital images (though I was forbidden to take photos with my phone…), over 60 years earlier, she had spent hours dutifully taking detailed notes with pen and paper in her notebook. I felt her presence as I bent over the pages peering into two family stories – first, the story of those who conducted the documented transactions and, second, the story of their granddaughter (my great-grandmother) who was trying to craft an accurate and thorough story of her mother’s life. 

Standing on the grounds where my ancestors stood (or at least very near) is very meaningful to me. I really wanted to see the land my ancestors lived and farmed. The difficult truth is John Bachman and Sally were enslavers. Sally’s father died young and bequeathed enslaved humans to her – who she and John moved from Alabama to Louisiana, most likely separating them from family and loved ones. So finding and standing on this land felt particularly important.

Though I found legal descriptions of the plantation location near Opelousas, I was not able to locate with any confidence the actual land since the descriptions were based on other landowners’ property lines – for example, “bounded on the upper side by land heretofore owned by the widow Ludger Lemelle and now belonging to Wesley and Sidney Steen, and on the lower side by lands of Belazer Meuillon“– rather than survey coordinates. However, we did drive the length of road that should have taken us past the Lee Plantation and stopped to photograph sugar cane fields that very well could have been the ones farmed by the Lees 165 years ago.

I was more successful finding ancestral lands in Mansfield and Keatchie, where they moved in 1864. Some family stayed in the area, so we even met and had lunch with a real live cousin! We visited the old site of Keatchie College, the Mansfield church where Sally was a member for over 50 years and the Keatchie cemetery where John and Sallie are buried. My family packed a lunch and had a wonderful graveside picnic under the live oaks!

Sallie and John were both from Alabama and married there in 1846 before moving to Louisiana in 1851. So, we are now on our way to Clarke County, Alabama, the birthplace and childhood home of Sarah “Sallie” Elizabeth Rivers Harwell, my 3rd great-grandmother!