Mother's Stories

These are stories told to me by my mom, Kate Barnett, and my grandmother that I called Gram, Alma Green.
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Green and Coe Family History
Andy Boyd Green was my mother’s father and my Granddad. His parents were Andrew Ervin and Sarah Hannah (thought to be about half Cherokee Indian) Green. Andrew Ervin was thought to have been mostly Irish. His grandparents immigrated from Ireland or Scotland. Sarah Hannah Wyatt was born April 7, 1860 in Durden Hill County, Texas the daughter of Flemon Wyatt and Catherine Elizabeth Rich. Sarah Hannah died May 8, 1931. She and Ervin Green had a double wedding with Sarah’s sister Cynthia who was marrying Irvin’s nephew Sam Black. Sarah was a school teacher for a while. Sarah and Irvin had 14 children.

Edna Fennella – born Dec. 8, 1976, died Mar. 23, 1942, had 4 children
Maggie Irene, Fannie Ivan, Sara Thelda, Verle all with last name of Black.

Mary C. – born May 12, 1878, died Sept. 21, 1878

Myrtle Ann – born Mar. 3, 1880, died Sept. 21, 1958, had 1 child Fenella Ruth Jay.

Lucinda H. – born Sept. 12, 1881, died 1920, married Mansel M. Johnson on June 6, 1896.
Flemon Wilson – born Feb. 24, 1883, died Oct. 2, 1920

Amy Ervin – born Jan. 15, 1885, died Mar. 1, 1950 (I remember Mother saying that Aunt Amy was her favorite aunt. Seems she said Amy understood and helped her with her asthma.)

Herbert Emitt – born May 21, 1887, died 1976, married Lilly (Billie) Roschelle Merle who died from teeth problems.4 children Bessie Juanice 08-14-1912, William A., Boyd E., Rex Ervin 10-19-1920 to 1982? (I remember going to Uncle Rex’s funeral in about 1981 or’82 with Mother, & Sarah.) Married another woman named Billie,(she had a daughter Lillian that Herb and then Boyd took in.) accidently killed her when both were drunk. Went to jail for 1 year. Boyd & family took in his kids at that time. (I remember talking to Uncle Herb several times in my life. He lived with his daughter Juanice & her husband Jehu Jamison on his ranch in Texas in about 1965 when we visited there.)

Rex Clifton – born Aug 6, 1889, died Dec. 02, 1910

Fanny Lee – born Sept. 2, 1891, died April 2, 1892

Cilas Earl – born May 8, 1893

Andy Boyd – born Sept. 18, 1895, died Nov. 1950 (my granddad) married Alma Beatrice Coe, 3 daughters Catherine, Alma Elnora, Wanda.

Vida Millie – born Mar. 17, 1898, died ?, Lived in Tucson, AZ with husband most of life. I can remember visiting with her when we lived there in 1964.

Bess Faith – born may 15, 1900




At that time the ranch was so big you could go west from the house and not be sure where the next fence was. There was a huge, old mesquite tree by the house that was so big 3 men couldn’t reach around it. Boyd would climb up in it and lay on one certain branch, let his arms and legs dangle and sleep like a cat. Later his nephew Rex, a son of Herb, would fall out of the tree and land on his head. I think he must have been knocked out and for a while they weren’t sure if he would live or not.
Sarah Hannah was a tall, thin woman who was very strong physically and mentally because she had to run the ranch and raise her children a lot of the time by herself, while her husband Irvin was away on business. Sometimes he would be gone for months on end when he drove big herds of cattle northeast to the railroad or to Fr. Worth, Texas to send them to market on the cattle drives that have become legend in Western history. Ervin made a cow bell in his shop that he would hang on his lead steer when making the cattle drives. This was a common practice as one or two steers would usually become the leaders of each herd. Many drovers would then put a bell on the lead steer so that the rest of the herd would learn to follow the bell as well as that steer. Then if something happened to the lead steer the bell could be put on another lead steer. I now have the bell.
It was rumored that he would spend a lot of time having fun in town after he sold the herd before he would finally make it back to the ranch “just in time to make another baby.” There were 14 babies .


Ervin made what was supposed to be the best Irish whiskey in Texas in a still hide on the ranch. He had a store for a while that he would sell the whiskey in. One time Sarah decided that her sons were drinking too much of the whiskey from the still so she got rid of that still. Irvin probably built another one somewhere else later on.
Later in life she would be known as Granny Green to her family and friends.
Several times Boyd and his brothers brought in a coyote put to raise and try to make a ‘dog’ out of it. Each time their mom told them they could keep it until it killed one of her chickens and then they would have to kill it. She said that coyotes could not be taught to not kill chickens. Each time she was proved right and the pet coyote would have to be disposed of. I guess the Green’s and the Coe’s always were willing to make a pet out of a wild animal. There are several stories of this that Mother told me. I will tell the others at the right time period.
Boyd went in the Army during World War 11. He was sent to France as a sniper in some of the worst fighting over there. He was ‘gassed’ as it was called while there and because of that he would have health problems the rest of his life, but they didn’t show up until a few years after my mom was born. He had a bad case of appendicitis while in the Army and nearly died.
Boyd’s sister, Bessie became friends with Alma Coe during World War 1 when the Coe’s bought the farm next to the Green ranch. Bessie told Alma she had a brother in the war in France that Alma could have when he came home. I think they wrote to each other some. When Boyd came home she introduced them and they were married. After WW1 Alma worked for a while in a candy factory. I have a poster that came from the store. She said they were allowed to eat all the candy they wanted but after a while they didn’t seem to want much of it. While she and Boyd were courting they would ride in a buggy pulled by a horse named Brownie.


Boyd married my grandmother Alma Beatrice Coe in 1920. Alma was the daughter of Francis Mariam (Frank) Coe and Julia Catherine Goodrum. They, also, had a son Gordon and daughters Olive, Zuma, and Ernest (yes, Aunt Ernest was a woman). Alma was the youngest living child but there were two sons and a daughter, Ruth that died at an early age. Janice says, “The two brothers of Alma’s that died when they were young were close in age. There is a picture of them. I think I have been told that they were born and died before Alma was born. I remember Alma talking about her sister, Ruth, that died when she was six. From the pictures I have seen of her she looks like she had Down’s Syndrome. Alma said that the night she died there were a lot of people there. She had been sick for some time.” Alma and Ruth were a lot younger than the older children of the family. Alma said that her older sisters had married and had children at about the same time she was born. She was closer friends with her nieces than with her sisters. She said that her older sister, Ernest, was forced by her father to marry someone she did not want to marry because he thought she might be pregnant. That marriage didn’t last very long. Seems as if Aunt Ernest was married several times.
I seem to remember my mother saying that Frank Coe was several years younger than Julia Goodrum when they married. She said that Julia had played a violin before they were married but Frank said she couldn’t anymore so she didn’t. She said that the Coe family moved around a lot and that Alma was 3 when they moved from MO to TX in a covered wagon. Frank Coe always wore a beard until he went blind and couldn’t take care of it. He hated to have to shave it off. Alma shaved him after he went blind, until she married. He had a walking cane he would use to hook his grandkids and other children to pull them to him so he could feel them and see how much they had grown which made a lot of the kids afraid of him. Janice has the cane.
Julia had a blowing horn made out of a cow horn kind of like a hunting horn that she would blow to call Frank and any hands in from the field when it was time for lunch or if there was an emergency. I don’t know who made the blowing horn but at one time I could blow it some. It was said that when Julia blew the horn it could be heard for up to a mile. I have the horn.
Julia Coe wanted an organ. She saved the money she made selling eggs to buy the organ. The organ has a metal tag stating it was made in St. Louis, MO in 1904. It was passed down to

Alma, then her daughter, Catherine and now, my sister, Janice has it. It has a stool that turns that belongs with it.
As a young girl, Alma, remembered going on a family picnic. Her mother became very embarrassed when she bent over to pick up something off the ground and the wind blew her dress over her head. The hem of the dress got tangled up with her bonnet and she had to have her husband help her untangle it. Alma and everyone else thought it was very funny.
Alma had a pet wild animal story to tell us, as Boyd had his of the coyotes. One of her sister, Ernest, somehow got a baby prairie dog and raised it. It was allowed to stay in the house and when a stranger came it would stand behind the front door and make the noise that prairie dogs make when they are threatened by a predator. They would laugh at it because it sat right beside the shotgun that was also kept behind the door as was common then to be handy against the threat of a bad person trying to break into the house.
On one very hot day when Alma was a teenager, she was washing clothes in the washtub. Without thinking of what she was doing, she had rolled her sleeves up to her elbows so she could be a little bit cooler. Her father saw her, and scolded her because she had shown her elbow, even though there was no one else around to see her.
When Alma was 18, a school was started where they were living (town unknown). One more child was needed to officially open the school. Even though she was considered too old to go to school, she was allowed to for a while so the school could be opened. She was glad of the chance to get just a little bit more schooling. Alma was not very well educated, but thought everyone should be, and all her life she read and tried to learn more about anything and everything she could. She and granddad passed this idea down to all three of their daughters, and Alma helped me and my sisters and cousins in this belief.
Alma said that her parents wouldn’t let her go to any dances or get-to-gathers for the young people except for well chaperoned ones at church. So she would sometimes wait until she thought everyone was safe and slip out of bed, then climb out her bedroom window and meet her nieces, who were her best friends. They would then go to dances, or meet their boyfriends for a few hours. She said she never did get caught.
Gram, (Alma) told me of watching the sandhill cranes, and whooping cranes come by the hundreds in the winter to feed in the fields on the crops that had been planted. The cranes were hunted by everyone then to keep them from eating the crops and as food which made them almost disappear like the buffalo. The sandhill cane managed to come back like the buffalo has but the whooping crane is still very much endangered. I have seen a couple at a distance when visiting the Bosque del Apache Bird Refuse near Socorro, NM. Gram would tell me how she liked to watch them do their mating dances in the spring.
http://www.friendsofthebosque.org/Friendsindex.html

I don’t remember how old they were but one day Alma and her sister, Ernest took the Model T Ford car to the Dorn School on Sandy Road. They didn’t check the car out well. They went to some friends and on the way home the car overheated. Ernest hadn’t been to the bathroom all day

as their hadn’t been anything to pee in. so Ernest and Alma climbed up on the engine and peed in the radiator so they would have enough ‘water’ to get home.
Alma told us of how her parents were very strict, but how her mother’s father had been even worse, practically a tyrant. She said that her mother’s father had become mad at some little something her mother had done as a small child. He had taken her doll and thrown it in the fireplace as part of her punishment. One of her brothers had managed to rescue the doll before it was completely burned up. He had thrown it high up into a tree. She was never sure why he did that. She said she would often stand under the tree, and look up at where the doll was lodged. She said she wanted the doll back, but knew it was safer in the tree. She didn’t think the doll ever came out of the big, tall tree.
Even if he wasn’t good to his children I guess he was good to the slaves he owned before the Civil War. His slaves didn’t want to leave when they were freed, either. Just as the Barnett story of slaves is told. The slaves even took on the Coe name as their last name as they didn’t have any other last name when people would ask them. It is thought that there are black or African American people with the last name of Coe that can be traced their family stories back to the Coe Farm in MO before and during the Civil War. Alma said she met a black woman once with the last name was Coe and they thought that her family had come from the Coe Farm.
Alma and Boyd had my mom, Catherine (her middle name was supposed to be Lois but it didn’t get on her birth certificate) a few years after they were married on July 18, 1924. I have an old photo of her and their bird dog, Don playing in a mud puddle when she was about a year old. They had a small ranch and I remember Gram (Alma) and Mother telling me that Granddad raised and trained mules. He, also, usually had greyhound and English pointer dogs. They had a pointer named Old Don. One day my mom, Catherine, who was just walking, wondered off and into the pen with the mules and horses. Old Don went with her and stayed between her and the mules and was even kicked by one while he was taking care of the baby. Maybe near a place named Stanton, Texas

Mother, Kate, said that the green brand was an H with the horizontal bars for the E attached to the right hand side of the H. The H stood for Sarah Hannah and the E for Ervin in Andrew Ervin’s name. The nearest town to the ranch was Colorado City, Texas that was originally called Colorado, Texas. The ranch was west of the town. Mother said she was born July 18, 1924 in Granddad Green’s (Andrew Ervin) one room house, close to the railroad track and 3 miles west of Colorado City, Texas. Her dad was renting the house from his dad.
Mother told us how the dogs would catch the big jackrabbits that were so thick in Texas that jackrabbit roundups were held to help control the population. She said that one of the greyhounds would take off after a rabbit and chase it until he could get it to go by where one of the pointer dogs was hid waiting. The pointer would jump out and catch the rabbit as it ran by then the pointer and the greyhound would share the rabbit.
When Catherine was five her sister, Alma Elnora, was born on Dec.29, 1928, and two years later another sister, Wanda was born on Nov. 17, 1930.
It wouldn’t be long afterward that Boyd and Alma would take in Herb Green five children when Herb was sent to jail for accidently killing his wife when they were both drunk. For whatever reason Boyd got to keep the rifle, a Winchester 73, caliber 25/20. Herb used to kill his wife. Boyd and Alma had it until he died in 1950. During that time Alma used the rifle when they went deer hunting. Alma gave it to Rex when Boyd died.
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Combining the two families put a huge hardship on all concerned and was about the time that Boyd started having health problems from his experiences in WW1. I think it is this combining of families that caused so much of the problems that didn’t really so with my mom until she was in her late 50’s. This was also about the time of the Great Depression and the big family had to be very saving with everything and didn’t have the money for any extra’s. Food and clothes were even in short supply at times. Most of the time they lived in small two or three room houses so a lot of the time Herb’s boys Rex, Bill, and Johnny would live outside in a shed when the weather would let them. Even though it was hard on Mother she was glad to have her ‘brothers’. She would always feel closer to the boys than to the girls that were so much older than her, Jaunice and Lillian. My mom, Catherine was about the same age as her cousin, Johnny. They did everything together at that time. She told stories of how they would go to the field to get one of the old horses to ride. They would be barefoot and only had a rope for the horse. Johnny would put the rope around the horse’s neck, then he would use his toes to climb up the horse’s leg until he could grab its mane and pull himself up onto its back. Then he would hold his hand down to Catherine and she would do the same thing. Then they would ride him around the field until they got tired of riding and get off.
At sometime either one of her cousins or a neighbor kid put a lizard down Catherine’s back under her dress. From that time on she was afraid of them even though she knew they wouldn’t hurt her. When we were living in Silver City, NM in about 1971 my sister, Sarah had a big, gray cat named Smokey. Smokey would go out and catch lizards and come to the door or window with one in his mouth, held in the middle with the head handing out one side and the tail the other side of the cats mouth. Mother fuss at him and tell him to take it away before she would let him in. On the other hand, Smokey, the mighty hunter, got to where he would bring her birds still alive. He would put them in Mother’s hand, unhurt, and Mother would then turn the bird loose where the cat couldn’t see her do it. He brought her a baby chipmunk one day that was just old enough to leave the hole when it had been born. Sarah kept the chipmunk in a large, bird cage in the house for several years.
Johnny and Bill seemed to disappear down somewhere in Texas after WW11 and I don’t think the family heard anything more from them. We did see Rex frequently. He lived in or near Albuquerque, NM when we lived there. He married Wilma (we called her Aunt Billie) and they had a daughter Terry, a few years older than me, and a son, Kelly Rex who was a few months younger than me. He was born in Nov. 1951. We went to two years of high school together at Rio Grande High in Albuquerque, NM in 1967-1969. Later Kelly married and had two sons, one of whom was named Shane if I remember correctly. Rex got into the race horse business and owned a few race horses. He always wanted to be with the mares when they foaled as he said that you could tell in the first few minutes if it would be a good horse. In one place I found a note that said Rex’s mom was named Lucy not Lilly or Billie as other places said. Don’t know which one is right.
After Herb got out of jail Boyd and Alma and their three daughters decided to move to Silver City, NM after Boyd was told that his health might improve there but if he stayed in Texas he would probably be dead in about six months. Catherine said that the five of them and all their household goods were in a Model T Ford pickup for the trip from Colorado City, Texas to Silver City, NM. Where there was a Tuberlosis sanitarium plus a VA hospital at nearby Fort Bayard, NM where Boyd could see Army doctors. Catherine was ten years old when they moved. He may have had Berger’s Disease a kind of hardening of the arteries that came from being gassed during WW1.