Margaret Craig and the Family Record

Margaret Alline Morris Craig compiled the record that preserved the Morris, Thompson, and McAdams families of Walker County, Texas.¹

A Daughter’s Inheritance

Margaret was born on April 12, 1913, in Huntsville, Texas — the third child and only daughter of James Walter Morris and Ethel Arrine Thompson. Her father Jim ran a barber shop at 1425 Fifteenth Street. He died in March 1925 of esophageal cancer at thirty-nine, leaving Ethel with four children: R.E. (1907), Jack (1911), Margaret, and James Walter Jr. (1921).¹

Margaret was twelve. Through her maternal grandmother, Tommie McAdams Thompson, she knew stories reaching back to John McAdams Jr., who had served with the Texian Army from 1836 and founded the McAdams community. Through the Morris side, the family traced to Anson County, North Carolina, and the 1853 migration to Milam County, Texas.¹

Stories and Poems

Margaret compiled Stories and Poems (second edition), a 110-page family record tracing the Morris, Thompson, McAdams, Bankhead, Nobles, Floyd, and Moore families from Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and colonial South Carolina through their migrations to Texas.¹

The book is part genealogy, part memoir, part poetry collection. It records birth dates and marriage records alongside personal memories — who inherited the gold-cased Elgin pocket watch, what kind of man Grandpa Billy Morris was, how Hester White asked to be buried under a hickory tree. Early poems signed “MMcD” date from 1940–1941, including “Barbara Jean,” a poem addressed to her young daughter.¹

She documented the McAdams family’s arrival in Nacogdoches in 1830, John Jr.’s thirteen military campaigns, the founding of the McAdams community in 1844, and the chain of land grants and marriages connecting these families across three centuries.¹

The Bridge

Margaret first married E. S. McDuffie. Their daughter Barbara Jean, born in 1934, married William Burl Ledbetter on August 27, 1955, in Austin.² That marriage joined the Morris-Thompson-McAdams line with the Ledbetter family.

Margaret’s Stories and Poems became the Morris-side counterpart to William Burl Ledbetter Jr.’s Facts and Photos compilation — two family records from two branches, converging in one line.²

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Margaret Alline Morris Craig died in 2003.