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Beginnings

Saturday, August 26, 2017

The remarkable children of George and Alice Wakefield.

George Wakefield married Alice in 1888. I've never been clear on whether George was Alice's first husband or not because I've seen her name in several combinations of Alice Letcher Hayes Reid. It wasn't unheard of in the late nineteenth century, for a person to marry and lose a spouse within the first few years. As we've seen previously with Len and Sallie Bryant, it does happen.

Greensboro Record, April 1900
At any rate, by 1890 Alice had given birth to the first of eight children she would bear between then and 1903. The oldest child was my great grandmother, Mary Pearl Wakefield (sometimes mislabelled Pearl Margaret).

Pearl grew up to be a remarkable woman in her own right, and I look forward to writing her story someday. A newspaper item from 1900 will suffice to foreshadow the strong woman grandma Pearl would become. Click on the clipping to make it bigger.

Apparently, longevity is a genetic trait among the Wakefields, because two of Alice and George's daughters, Lillian and Hallie, outlived even their nonagenarian father. Each lived about three months beyond their one-hundredth birthday. George, Jr., also lived a very long life, reaching ninety-two years old.

Not all the siblings were so lucky. Pearl died in 1953, at only sixty-three years old, and another sister, Edna, died in 1940 at forty-one. Hallie's twin sister, Beulah, died in infancy.

Perhaps the luckiest of all of George and Alice Wakefield's children was their youngest son.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, in 1914, Thomas and his older brother, George, Jr., were out hunting; Thomas was accidentally shot in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. The story, published in the Greensboro Daily News, was picked up by newspapers across the region, and perhaps was carried even further.

Miraculously, Thomas Wakefield survived and lived an otherwise long and unremarkable life. When he died in May of 1983 he was eighty years old, and I suppose, still carried that bullet in his head.

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