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This web page is designed to document and to preserve the history of members of the:
Enoch Grigsby Mays' Family
This web page is intended to be a focus point for the accumulation of information relating to the life histories of Enoch Grigsby Mays, his family, descendants and others who touched and were part of their lives. The goal is to reconstruct their life histories to the best possible extent with a view toward ensuring that their memories and legacies are preserved for future generations to know and appreciate. The immediate family, as a whole, because of the inheritance left by Enoch Mays' father, Samuel Mays, due to the property that he accumulated in his lifetime, started out relatively well off materially and financially, but in one or two generations, conditions would change to the extent that several descendants would live and die in near poverty and several would be the last surviving member of their individual family branch without a loved one with the resources, ability, or inclination, to erect a marker on their grave at death. Today, the original family members covered in this paper have been largely forgotten. There is no evidence that their graves sites are visited now and some grave sites are unmarked, unkempt, or have tombstones that are almost unreadable due to the affects of aging. This is a compelling reason for me to locate as many graves sites [as of this writing I have located and visited 37 graves sites and know the where abouts of 3 or 4 more] as possible and document their location, so that they will not be forgotten or lost to history. To look at some of the simple grave markers or lack there of with the knowledge that I have accumulated about their lives is to see the disparity between life and death. How quick we forget our ancestors. We rarely have the benefit of knowing many of our ancestors personally and who they were or what they did. They are strangers to us for the most part and relegated to the past. Descendants of this family dispersed to many parts of the country, and the family no longer has any cohesion as a family. Most descendants have little knowledge or interest in their roots. The common theme that emerges from a study of this family is that they continued to move westward to seek new opportunities and rarely put down deep roots in one place. Texas was for a period the center of their lives. Each ancestor made a difference and contribution for those who followed and paved the way to make it a better place for us to live. Their needs and lives, perhaps, were simpler according to our present-day standards, but they lived rich and full lives in their day. They were intelligent, cultured people with dreams and hopes. We must factor in that they lived in a different period and see them through the prism of their era. We can learn from the examples they set and the mistakes they made. They were not always perfect and did not aways make the right decisions in life just as we don't. Sam Mays' ( who first drew my attention to this family) life encompassed several benchmarks in this nation's history including the pre Civil War period, the Civil War, post Civil War, reconstruction and reunification of the nation, the Spanish-American War, the final settlement of the American frontier, the turn of the century, World War I, the 1920’s, Prohibition, and the beginning of the Great Depression. Many ancestors lived their lives before the vast cultural impact of radio, television, motion pictures, motor vehicles, passenger airplanes, computers, and air conditioning. Electricity and indoor plumbing were luxuries that came later for most of them. Nevertheless, they witnessed the coming of the industrial age, the telegraph, telephone, and railway and mass transportation systems and the modern age. They were optimistic about the future and embraced progress. They worked, planned and prepared themselves to take advantage and be part of it. To be continued:
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