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.

• 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.

• The Post-War Reckoning

  Illness, divorce, remarriage, and the final diary, 1945–1963

  After the war, JJL faced a duodenal ulcer, stomach surgery, divorce from Leonora, marriage to Neva Moore, and the struggle with alcohol that defined his last years.

• Jack Wallace and Annapolis

  A congressman's appointment, a Washington visit, and the Class of 1951

  How Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Jack Wallace Ledbetter to the Naval Academy, and what his father recorded in the diary.

• Margaret Craig and the Family Record

  A daughter's work to preserve the Morris, Thompson, and McAdams lines

  How Margaret Alline Morris Craig became the family's historian, compiling Stories and Poems and bridging the Morris and Ledbetter family lines.