On This Day in Family History - January 24

 Margaret 'Peggy' Bullard was born 24 January 1852

Peggy's sister Emma Bullard Arnold was the mother of my great-great-grandfather John Henry Arnold.

 Emma had problems, and when John Henry was still a small child Peggy and her brother George Bullard took him in and raised him. 

Photo: George Bullard and Peggy Bullard (brother and sister)

I don't have a picture of their sister Emma

Here is what my great-grandmother Annie Arnold Hicks wrote about Aunt Peggy --

     Grandmother’s name before marriage was Emma Bullard. She married a man by the name of Arnold. They had one child, Henry (my father). They didn’t live together but three or four years. They had trouble because he wanted to move from Missouri to Texas (or at least that’s what set off the separation), with his folks and she wouldn’t move, but he went ahead and moved without her and in a little while he came back and wanted her to take him back but she wouldn’t. Then in a year or two she married a man by the name of Alex McReynolds. They had one boy and twin girls and they had trouble and he took the girls and left, and they never heard from him any more. 

     But about the time she married the second time, her brother and sister (neither one married) took my Dad - just a small boy about maybe 2 years old, and set up housekeeping and raised him. Their names were George Bullard and Margaret Bullard (Peggy). Uncle George and Aunt Peggy was always exactly like my Grandpa and Grandma. 

     After they got my Dad about raised, Uncle George married Josie Tamsett, an aunt of Amy Tamsett that John Carter married. Then a little later, Aunt Peggy married Alex Williams, a very strange character. Aunt Peggy said she never could get acquainted with him or understand his actions. Lots of nights he would get up in the night and sit in the door with his gun just like he was expecting a murderer, but in just a few years he was walking home across an old field where there was some dead trees and one of them fell on him and killed him. Just the day before that, he had a snuff box packed full of $20 gold pieces and that would be a lot of money for them times. He evidently had hid that money for not a penny could be found (about 1897). In those days gold pieces were in common circulation. They got the idea that he bored a hole in a tree and put the box of money in the hole and put a peg in on it, but they had no idea which tree nor for sure that he did that, so there wasn’t any chance to find the money. This all took place in Missouri around Thayer. 

     My Father was grown and married before Aunt Peggy married. 

Henry Arnold married Adaline Carter, and they had 5 children.

Photo: Front - Aunt Peggy, Adaline holding Etta, John, Henry holding Marlie. Back - George and Annie (my great-grandmother). 

This picture would have been taken in 1900 or 1901. Aunt Peggy married Alex Williams in 1988. I'm not sure when he died, but they had only been married a couple years. 

Peggy married Bryant Holley in November 1901. She died in 1912 at age 60. Bryant Holley died in 1922, age 81. As far as I know, Aunt Peggy never had any children of her own.