Margaret Craig and the Family Record

Every family history depends on someone who decides to write it down. For the Morris, Thompson, and McAdams families of Walker County, Texas, that person was Margaret Alline Morris Craig.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 in Huntsville. He died in March 1925 of esophageal cancer at thirty-nine, leaving Ethel widowed with four children: R.E. (1907), Jack (1911), Margaret, and James Walter Jr. (1921).¹

Margaret was twelve when her father died. What she inherited was not property but memory — stories of her maternal grandmother, Tommie McAdams Thompson, whose own father John McAdams Jr. had served with the Texian Army from 1836 and founded the McAdams community in Walker County. Through the Morris side, the family traced back to Anson County, North Carolina, and the migration to Milam County, Texas, in 1853.¹

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

Margaret’s genealogical research was meticulous. 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 that connected these families across three centuries.¹

The Bridge

Margaret first married E. S. McDuffie. Their daughter Barbara Jean, born in 1934, grew up to marry William Burl Ledbetter on August 27, 1955, in Austin.² That marriage united the Morris-Thompson-McAdams heritage with the Ledbetter family line — and placed Margaret’s genealogical work at the intersection of two family histories.

Through Barbara Jean, the descendants of a Texas Revolution veteran and a Missouri engineer became one family. Margaret’s Stories and Poems became the Morris-side counterpart to William Burl Ledbetter Jr.’s JJLHIST compilation — two family records, from two branches, converging in a single line.²

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Margaret Alline Morris Craig died in 2003.