Stories

Thematic narratives connecting the people and events across generations of East Texas families.

• The McAdams Community

  From the Sabine to Walker County — a family, a settlement, and a cemetery under a hickory tree

  How a Scottish-Irish family fleeing violence on the Texas frontier founded a settlement in Walker County that endured for generations.

• The Ledbetter Diaries

  Excerpts from thirty-three years of daily entries, 1928–1961

  Col. John Jackson Ledbetter Jr. kept personal diaries from 1928 through 1961 — a vivid first-person record of Depression-era Texas, wartime service, family life, and mid-century Austin.

• Depression-Era Texas

  Job loss, bank failure, and the decade of self-invention, 1928–1941

  Through the worst economic crisis in American history, John Jackson Ledbetter Jr. lost his job, lost his bank, tracked every dollar — and made himself into both an engineer and an attorney.

• Military Service and the War

  From reserve officer to Colonel — twenty years in uniform, 1925–1946

  John Jackson Ledbetter Jr. was commissioned as a reserve artillery officer in 1925. By the time he retired in 1946, he had served across the wartime South, studied Japanese for the occupation of Japan, and been broken by the same ulcer that had shadowed him since the Depression.

• Family Life in El Paso

  Births, illnesses, a murder, and the small rituals of domestic life, 1930–1941

  The Ledbetter diaries record a decade of family life in El Paso with uncommon intimacy — infant weights to the quarter-ounce, childhood emergencies, a sister's murder, and the rhythms of a household on the border.