04-02-01

I received a card in the mail last week that in bold print says, Bouncer, I have a question; If we don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t use bad words, and don’t do anything naughty... How the heck can we expect to have a good time? Found the enclosed card while going through mother’s postcard collection. Love Billie.

The card was just for me from my cousin Billie from down on the Island; she had been going through some of her mother’s old suff which is stored under her house. If you are not familiar with Galveston Island homes, especially some that have survived the great storm that came along in 1900 and destroyed almost all the island, these homes have large 12 foot tall ceilings and are constructed on ten foot stilts, and there is enough room under the house to park a couple of pickups. She also has enough room for an art gallery and a third of the floor space is occupied by a handy man that finishes antique furniture. Cousin Billie’s house was fairly new at the time of the great storm. This same area is the storage place for a great amount of file cabinets of history and old photos that go back to Aubrey’s beginnings, and every now and then she sends me some of her old collections of Onega.

Part of her collection came from the attic of the Fort Worth home belonging to her mother. When her mother died, Billie and I had the task of going through a lot of the old stuff and deciding what was trash and what needed to be saved. I was very reluctant to decide that any of the old stuff needed to be called trash. I have in my possession a back pack that looks as though it was constructed of willow stems and tied together with some kind of roots that still hold it together. I am going to bring it down to the local Cherokee pow wow and put it on display for one of the topics of discussion.

I remember I got into a very serious argument with Billie, when she told me to throw that old magazine rack in the trash. I had a difficult time telling Billie and getting through her well constructed brain cover that this was not a magazine rack, but a back pack used by Cherokee mothers for carrying their small babies on their backs while they worked in their gardens and house work.

I do believe that Billie has finally given up on its being called a magazine rack. I asked her what magazines would have been put in the rack during this period, and she scratched her head and began to wonder what magazines would have been, and if they were where are they now.

So I am taking this opportunity to invite Billie to go back under her house and look again as I am just about to run out of history to print, and I will need to rely on others to help me with the recalls.

The card shows two sons of H. Ross Edwards with their drums. Ross Edwards was the son of Lemuel N. Edwards who was the Edwards who plotted the town of Aubrey and helped in changing the name of the town from Onega to Aubrey in the 1880's.

The Edwards family was a prominent family in the settlement of Aubrey and during its early beginnings. The Cherokees were a friendly tribe with several families that helped make up the village some forty years before the Town was platted. Many descendants are local and exist from these early day Cherokees of North Texas.

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