Researching Family History One Record at a Time
Full-length pieces written by family members themselves — memoirs, manuscripts, and published work — reproduced here rather than just cited. Where a person named in one of these pieces has their own profile, their name links there; everyone named is also gathered on the Name Index.
This section is new and growing slowly and deliberately, one piece at a time. Some of what's written here reflects the language and attitudes of when and where it was written rather than how the site's own research pages are written; look for a content note at the top of a piece where that applies.
By John Richard Jackson, writing as "Thundermug"
John's six self-published books of stories, verses and photographs, mostly of Creede, Colorado, published between 1993 and the early 2000s. All six are long out of print and are reproduced here as he wrote them.
By John Richard Jackson, with his sister Pauline Roberta "Bubbles" Jackson Bates
John's unpublished memoir of growing up in Creede, Colorado — planned as a joint project with his sister, who never wrote her half. Found among his papers after his death and transcribed here, piece by piece.
By John Richard Jackson, signed "j jackson," 1991
A typed poem John wrote in 1991 about Charles S. Mashburn, the stern principal of Mineral County High School in Creede, and a classroom stove that Bobby loaded with bullets. Found among John's papers; it does not appear in any of his books or in "Please Go to Hell."
By Robert Abraham Lincoln "Lynn" Davis
A poem Robert wrote after the death of his son, Robert Lincoln Davis, who died of bronchopneumonia during the 1918 flu epidemic a month short of his eighteenth birthday. The surviving typed copy carries no title of its own; the one here is editorial, quoting the poem's own final line.
By Robert Abraham Lincoln "Lynn" Davis, writing as "Bone Head"
A poem on a very old, filmy sheet of paper, enclosed in a letter Robert sent his daughter Jo. His own note calls it something he wrote years earlier for a widow he was courting, who didn't believe he'd written it himself — but the poem itself is addressed to "Cora Dear," and Cora Martin is the widow Robert went on to marry in 1931, and stayed married to for the rest of his life.
By Alice Josephine "Jo" Davis Jackson
A poem Jo wrote after the death of her husband, William "Billy" Jackson, in 1957. Her son John later published it in his 1997 collection "Echoes from the Thundermug," under his own column heading, "Marriages Weather Storms with Love."
By Pauline Roberta "Bubbles" Jackson Bates
A poem Bubbles wrote about rescuing her drunken brother John from a truck he'd run into the creek in Creede, years before she married — and, per family knowledge, a poem the local newspaper's owner refused to print at the time, only to see it published years later by the paper's next owner, without asking either Bubbles or John first.