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MARCELLOUS NEELY born November 21, 1891 or November 24, 1892; died June 11, 1893; 6 or 19 months old.
By Roy “Buddy” Neely Jr.
Marcellous was bom in Blount County, Alabama, before the Will Neely family moved to Texas by train, which likely took place in December, 1892. The children in addition to Marcellous accompanying their parents were Erastus 4, Clyde 3, and Wastella about 1 year plus 10 months.
Marcellous died in infancy the following summer when the family lived in Ellis County, Texas, about a dozen miles southeast of Waxahachie, which is the county seat. Handwritten notes by Roy’s wife Elizabeth record that “when W.H. and family came to Texas from Alabama, they stayed a few weeks with Uncle Henry Wood at Maloney.” Also noted is that “Neelys lived on Little Onion Creek when they first came to Texas.” It is thought that Will farmed as a sharecropper only one or two years at that location. Later years in the area were spent in the western part of Ellis County, some 20 miles distant, in the vicinity of Maypearl and nearby Venus in adjoining Johnson County.
There is no longer any existing evidence whatsoever of the town of Maloney, no remnants of building foundations, nothing at all. The Maloney cemetery is less than a mile south of the previous Maloney town site, in open, fertile, black land prairie farm country, and is easily accessible on a gravel road. Little Onion Creek flows only occasionally about a half mile to the south.
Maloney Cemetery has not been actively used in recent decades; the most recent gravestone indicates a burial in 1969. There are about 100 grave markers.
Marcellous’ gravestone is a basic upright limestone slab which has been broken off at the base and again in the middle, but twice repaired so that today it stands upright, and the deeply engraved names and date markings are clearly legible. Adjacent is the grave marker for J.T. Neely Jr, “son of J.T. & M.L. Neely born May 4, 1901 died May 3, l902.” This baby was the son of Will's brother John Theophilus Neely who had married “Lizzie” Henson in Waxahachie on December 30, 1895, and was therefore Marcellous’ first cousin.
There is apparently conflicting information as to Marcellous’ birth date. What we have for consideration are the following items:
The grave marker shows November 24, 1891. The bible entry is November 24, 1892. Wastella’s birth date in the bible was February 21, 1891. Oral history from Elizabeth is that Marcellous’ mother, Ulah, said that he was her smartest child; might she have reached that conclusion from the activities of a 6 1/2 month old baby? Wastella said (to Doris and Bill) that she remembers traveling from Alabama to Texas; she would have been about 1 year and 10 months old at the time if bom in 1891. Could Wastella have been actually bom a year earlier than recorded in the Bible? (The Bible entry appears less than perfectly clear, the original date having apparently been “corrected” at some later time.) Although certainly unusual, this is not to suggest that Wastella’s memory of an event prior to her second birthday is impossible. For another similar example, read on page 186 as Wanda remembers sitting on Ulah’s lap when she was (likely) within days of her second birthday.
Might Marcellous have been a very small (premature?) baby, making it doubly difficult to survive? Possibly Worth noting also is Grover’s birth date of November 1, 1893.
From a purely logical physiological “normal” baby spacing standpoint, it might be thought that the “best fit” would be for Wastella to have been born in February, 1890 (16 months after Clyde in October, 1888), Marcellous 20 months later in November, 1891, and then Grover 23 months after that.
My (Buddy) memory from a conversation many years ago with my dad (Roy), or Uncle U.R., is that Will and family arrived in Dallas by train one cold December night With all their possessions in a wooden box four feet on each side, with four children, including Marcellous as a baby.
Uncle U.R. also related that when the family took the baby Marcellous to the cemetery for burial in the summer of 1893, it had been forgotten to bring ropes with which to lower the little coffin. Instead they simply took the leather reins from the wagon team and used those. Of course this story was second hand to him, Uncle U.R. having been born nine years later in 1902. Nevertheless, one gets a strong sense of the emotion of the parents and brothers Erastus and Clyde and sister Wastella as they mourned the passing of the baby. Grandmother Ulah was pregnant with Grover that summer, and he was bom later in that year, November 1.
The heading of this narrative shows the grave marker date for Marcellous’ birth and his age calculated at 19 months as a result. It remains for each reader, one supposes," to conclude for himself which of the possibilities described above is most likely.