Margaret Alline Morris Craig

Margaret Alline Morris was born on April 12, 1913, in Huntsville, Texas, the third child and only daughter of James Walter Morris and Ethel Arrine Thompson. She grew up in a world shaped by East Texas community life, Baptist church culture, and the long shadow of pioneer history that ran through both sides of her family.¹

Early Life

Margaret was born into a family that already stretched deep into Texas history. Her maternal grandmother, “Tommie” McAdams Thompson, was the daughter of John McAdams Jr. — a veteran of the Texas Revolution who had served with Sam Houston’s forces and became patriarch of the McAdams Community in Walker County. Her paternal grandfather, William James “Billy” Morris, had been a farmer, teacher, and Justice of the Peace whose family had migrated from Anson County, North Carolina, to Milam County, Texas, in 1853.¹

When Margaret was eleven, her father Jim died of esophageal cancer at the age of thirty-nine. His death in March 1925 left her mother Ethel widowed with four children. Margaret’s brothers were R. E. (Robert Edward, born 1907), William Otho “Jack” (born 1911), and James Walter Jr. (born 1921).¹

The Family Historian

Margaret became the family’s great archivist. Her book Stories and Poems (2nd Edition) is a 110-page compilation of genealogical chapters, memoir essays, letters, and poetry that traces the Morris, Thompson, McAdams, Bankhead, Nobles, Floyd, and Moore families from their origins in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and the American colonial South through their migration to Texas.¹

The book draws on census records, church records, family Bibles, oral history, and correspondence with relatives across the country. It preserves details that would otherwise have been lost — the circumstances of John McAdams Sr.’s emigration from Scotland, the story of George A. Lamb’s death at the Battle of San Jacinto, the layout of Jim Morris’s barber shop in downtown Huntsville.

Marriages and Family

Margaret first married E. S. McDuffie, with whom she had a daughter, Barbara Jean McDuffie, born in 1934. A photograph captioned “1936 — Margaret and Barbara” appears in Stories and Poems.¹

She later married Richard Craig, from whom she took the surname that appears on her published work. Some of her early poems are signed “MMcD” — likely her initials during the McDuffie marriage — and date from 1940–1941.¹

Through her daughter Barbara Jean’s marriage to William Burl Ledbetter in 1955, Margaret’s Morris-Thompson-McAdams heritage became linked to the Ledbetter family of Austin, Texas.²

Poetry

Margaret was also a poet. Her poems, collected in the final pages of Stories and Poems, reflect on love, loss, motherhood, and resignation. “Barbara Jean” (1941) is addressed to her young daughter. Several poems are marked by the understated emotional restraint characteristic of their era.¹

She died in 2003, having lived to see four generations of her family grow from the roots she so carefully documented.