Wallingford/Jarlov Family Trees

Notes made by Nick Wallingford, April 2010:

Dovie Mae Strickland Gray Ogg

Dovie Mae was born a Strickland, born in Louisiana. She had two older sisters, and though details are not clear, her mother (Anne or Annie) must have ended up in perilous financial times. Just about the time Annie remarried to F. Marion Tippitt (23 January 1900, in Caddo Parish, Louisiana), in the 1900 census, Mae's two older sisters are shown as living in an orphanage, while it appears Mae was still with her mother.

Dovie Mae's exact birth year was never clear. Many years later Roland Wallingford helped with the process of getting Social Security by having people declare they had known her, taking statutory declarations on the other necessary legal actions for someone who does not have a birth certificate. They determined that she was born in 1897, but based on the census papers, it may have been 1896, or even 1894 - it is variously recorded through the years...

By 1900, her mother had remarried to F. Marion Tippett, all this still in Louisiana. She was still there for the 1910 census.

In 1916, Dovie Mae married Seaborn Nelson Gray in Caddo Parish, Louisiana (the northwest corner of the state). His sister Alice Gray signed the "Process of Verbal Marriage" that helped to make the connection to figure out who Seaborn was related to.

Seaborn came from a large Louisiana family - he was the ninth of twelve children, born and raised in either Caddo or Union Parish (Union in the north central part of the state).

Corinne Ogg Wallingford told her daughter Joan that Mae had had two children - one stillborn and one dying of cot death - and then her husband died of appendicitis. Death certificates seem to bear this out. The family lived in Jefferson, in East Texas just north of Marshall, near to the border with Louisiana. Seaborn registered for the draft for WWI in June 1917, described as 26 years old, tall, with dark brown eyes and light brown hair.

They had a stillborn baby boy a month later, on 1 August 1917. The child was buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Jefferson, Texas.

Just over a year later, on 26 October 1918, they had a second child, a girl, naming her Bessia. Just over two months later, on 2 January 1919, she was found "dead in bed in adjoining room where Father and Mother both sick with influenza." She, too, was buried in Oakwood Cemetery, in Jefferson.

Then, on 21 May 1921, Seaborn himself died. It cannot be confirmed as appendicitis, but he died at at Oakes Sant Homer Oil Field, Claiborne, Louisiana. This may in fact mean the town of Homer, in Claiborne Parish, Louisiana.

Seaborn was buried in the Pine Grove Cemetery, in Shiloh, Union Parish, Louisiana, along with both of his parents and a number of his siblings.

So by late 1921, by the time Dovie was 25, she had had a pretty unsettled upbringing, and then lost two children and her husband. According to Corinne Ogg Wallingford, she moved to Houston and started working at Munn's Department Store. This may have been to live near her sister Emma Louise, who had also married into the "Tippitt" family, but not sure what the connection to the man her mother had married. Corrine Ogg Wallingford says that Henry Warren Ogg, Jr. met her there at Munn's, when he was doing cabinet making in the store.

Henry and Mae married on 4 December 1927, just under two years after Henry's first wife, Bessie Campbell Ogg, had died of tuberculosis.

Dovie Mae, who had never really been around children, suddenly had five, ranging in age from 18 year old Ernest down to 2 year old Marjorie. The three boys, Ernest, Andrew and Leo, all referred to her as "Miss Mae".

Corinne Ogg Wallingford said that "in later years, Mae shared a house with Mrs Schrell. They shared the bath room but each had their own other rooms".

Nancy Courtney Wilson tells a story about her father, Ray Courtney, talking to Mae: "Papa said she also worked for A.V. Emmott & Sons bookbindery at some point. When he talked to her about his print shop in her later years, she told him she had worked in the printing business and her hands were making the movements of tamping the papers into alignment to apply the glue the whole time she talked. I think that is probably the only real conversation he ever had with her and I remember him being impressed."

Joan Wallingford Mickler remembers other stories: "It was Joan, Johnny, and Karen that got the "soda water". I think it was Johnny who had complained that his stomach hurt. [They had asked for 'soda water', wanting a carbonated sweet drink - Mae gave them baking soda in water, not knowing any better!] Grandma Ogg lived on Ashland in the Houston Heights. She rented rooms from a Mrs. Frels [Not sure if this is Frels or Schrell]. The house was elevated and had a tall (to us) closed in space. I remember going into it to get pillows, and I wished to have such an area under our house. Grandma had a real "ice box" which contained a block of ice delivered by an iceman. She took me downtown to a movie when I was about 5, and I looked up to see a fire on the ceiling. I was scared, but Grandma was very calm and we went slowly out. That's all I remember about it. She took me to a store downtown once, maybe Woolworths, and bought me a book, which I still have. It is about a cat and the illustrations had "fur" applied. I remember asking about Johnny and Karen, and she let me pick out a book for them also. I don't know if this was the same trip as the movie episode, but these are the only Grandma times I remember."

For the last few months of her life, Mae was in a nursing home, visited regularly by Marjorie Ogg Courtney and Corinne Ogg Wallingford (in fact, Farrar at that time). She died in August 1974, and was buried near Marjorie and Ray Courtney in the Fields Store Cemetery, Waller, Texas.