July 03

 HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO...

George Ned Arnold married Jessie Tamsett 1910

Photo: Ulysses Hicks, Annie Arnold, George Arnold, Jessie Tamsett 1910

George Ned Arnold was the brother of my great-grandmother Annie Arnold Hicks. Annie married my great-grandfather Ulysses Hicks in February of 1910 and George married Jessie Tamsett in July of that same year. 

George and Jessie had 8 children: 

Photo: George and Jessie Arnold with their first 5 children -- Amos, Arbie, Wilma, and twins Opie and Obie. Amos died at age 8 from typhoid fever.

Here's a photo of all seven girls: Arbie Wilma, Mildred, Obie and Opie, Verlie, Joan

 This is what my grandmother (Cleffie Hicks Burford, daughter of Annie Arnold Hicks) remembered about George Ned Arnold (transcribed from a tape recording):

 "My Uncle George Arnold -- he was a good man, and a likeable person.  But you know, he had a lot of bad luck in his life.  He married Jessie Tamsett and that was good.  They raised a family.  They had, I believe it was eight kids.  The last one though, left Aunt Jessie with, I don’t know if it was childbed fever or something else -- I just don’t know what it was, kind of an infection or poison of some kind in her body, and caused her to be sick and just, well she was in bad shape and lingered along for a few weeks -- maybe a month or more -- and then died, and that was awful.  And then he made out though for -- well, Ma [George's mother] went to live with him and help him raise them kids, so he made out just fine that way, but he didn’t have any wife.  I know that was bad for him.  But anyway, finally, after about five years why, he married another woman.  He married Eula Burnett, and then they set in and raised another family.  Just about the same size family as his first one was.  So he had pretty good luck with that.  Everything went alright.  But then in a few years, he got something wrong with him.  He didn’t know what it was. So he worried with that for a long time, just having trouble like if he had kidney trouble or something, and he didn’t know what to do about it.  Course, there wasn’t no doctors hardly up here in these hills then, and if there was they didn’t know much.  So he decided, well I think my dad talked to him some about it, and told him if he’d come down to Judsonia, he’d go with him over to Searcy and help him get a doctor.  I guess he made an appointment first, I don’t know.  Anyway, he did that.  He came down there and Papa took him over to a doctor in Searcy and after he examined him good why, he told him he had Bright’s disease and couldn’t do anything about it. I don’t know if there’s anything to do for it, might be now, I don’t know, but at that time they didn’t seem to think there was.  So he just came home and just suffered with that for I don’t know how long -- long time.  Finally, it got him -- it just killed him -- he died with it.  He’d lay in that room by himself, just he’d be the only one in there, in that back bedroom and on Sundays a lot of different people would come and see him and just come talk to him a little bit, sit there with him and then go.  That’s the way the last part of his life was for quite a while.  And he finally died.  That was the hardest part -- was just being in that shape, he was bedfast and just wasn’t nothing to be done."