An Old Story

As we grow older we become more interested in where we came from, and perhaps where we’re headed to when we “shuffle off this mortal coil.” At least, this happens for some of us. Thanks to my mother, I have always been interested in our family history. Daddy and his siblings talked little about their family. They didn’t know anything. I don’t remember either of my grandmothers entertaining us with stories about the Fuchses or the Hollises. Especially now that it is too late to learn first-hand more of what had to be an interesting story, I regret that I wasn’t insistent to learn more. It was short sighted on everyone’s part.

I know that our maternal German side landed at Galveston in 1866, from what was then Prussia, and settled northwest of Houston. Their family name—Benfer—appears as one of seven on the historical marker for the Klein community, along with Brill, Klein, Hildebrandt, Roth, Strack, and Theiss. An elementary school is named for my great-great grandparents. Only recently am I learning that one particular Fuchs branch, the offspring of one of my grandmother’s older brothers, is exploring their roots. Lovers of good food, just like my Hollis paternal side, this clan of cooks is regularly producing cookbooks with only family recipes—and now adding family history to their work. How delightful. How filled we pride in our heritage and hope for the future. One of my distant cousins told me a few months ago, after discovering me on the Internet, that she wanted her kids to know about their family.

Our branch of the Hollises immigrated from southeastern Alabama to Montgomery County Texas in the last decade of the 19th century—by train, according to some accounts. As I drove through Louisiana and Mississippi a couple of years ago on my first—and so far only—trip to Dothan Alabama, I tried to imagine what the road would have looked like in 1895, not knowing then that my Hollis ancestors hadn’t traveled by wagon.

Our Cousin Marilyn, whose mother Frances Edith was one of five Hollis siblings from the first generation born in Texas, is on a mission to uncover some of the story of the Hollises, one that begins in pre-Revolutionary North Carolina, with the birth of our great-great-great-great grandfather, Isaac. Until Marilyn began her work, I had determined only that our great-great grandfather, another Isaac, along with his wife, Cynthia Morrell, and their children, appeared in the 1870 census for Pike County Alabama. Cynthia’s roots were in Georgia, and the records show that Isaac and Cynthia were married there—I suppose just over the Alabama/Georgia line. It’s hard to imagine that these lovers could have met had the distance that separated them been of any significance.

Our great grandfather, David Riley Hollis, was born in Alabama in 1854 and our Grandpa Stephen Edgar—who died before my birth in 1943—was born there in 1882. Somehow David and Stephen ended up in two different cemeteries in East Texas. And to make the trail a little harder to follow for those who come after us, David’s wife—Martha Frances Ray Hollis—is buried by Stephen and our grandmother, Sallie Antoinette Forest Hollis, not by her husband. Their final places are indeed in two different counties. When I think about how our branch of the Benfer/Fuchs clan and the Hollises have ended up in who knows how many cemeteries, it gives me cause reconsider what I intend to have done with my own remains.

Marilyn’s curiosity has put her on the tracks of the maternal side of the Hollises as well, Meadows and Forest, with roots in Louisiana and North Carolina. That immigrant path down the Atlantic seaboard was a popular one, no doubt, as evidenced in the artisanship reflected in the architecture, furniture and utilitarian and decorative arts that made their way to Texas, well before the Civil War. What of any of that might have been part of our family history is lost to time. Families of modest means traveling south and west carried only the most cherished keepsakes and portable utilitarian goods with them. Looking at old photographs of Hollis faces we don’t know, folks garbed in Victorian dress, well, we won’t ever know.

In the last couple of years, I have spent most of my time in northern New Mexico. I’m not the first of the Hollises to plant some roots here. Daddy’s oldest brother, Pat, brought his family to New Mexico from Texas in 1946. Although his oldest son, Donald, returned to Texas after graduating from college, the remainder of that Hollis branch continued living their lives in the only city that really counted as home by that point. Uncle Pat and Aunt Martha, who had begun her life in northeast Texas, and their youngest son, Byron, moved to Arizona 30 years ago, which became the final resting place of Pat and Martha. And though I’ve continually reminded that blood ties do not produce close ties, given that I have cousins here in Santa Fe that I don’t know, we Hollis first cousins who have lived most of our lives in Texas continue to be close in a comforting way, as I was reminded recently when several of us gathered around our Aunt Mary, soon to celebrate her 92nd birthday. She is the last of her group of siblings.

Cousin Marilyn’s vigorous pursuit of our Hollis history is energizing and fun. The time she spent with my sisters and me just before I returned to New Mexico has renewed our childhood affection. Soon, she and my two sisters will gather in Texas again, just the girls, digging through Joan’s stuff and helping her get organized in the place she now calls home, what used to be the family home in the country. No doubt, they will talk throughout the day and late in to the night about their shared memories, reminding one another of things that each of them has forgotten. The interest my Fuchs cousins—the offspring of my maternal great uncle—have shown in their story—one we share—is nothing short of wonderful to me. I feel privileged to have been invited to walk a little of their journey. Except for a few sketchy memories of one cousin, their branch of the Benfer/Fuchs clan had become lost to me. I’ve contributed one of my Grandmother Lizzie’s recipes to the next edition of the Fuchs family cookbook. Details of our part of the family are documented in the book. The connection feels good.

An Old Story—Santa Fe New Mexico (April 24, 2009)
R. Harold Hollis