Marriage and Deaths--Armstrong-Nugent

Beside me on my desk are two or three piles of newspaper clippings, old letters, an Applicant's Working Sheet for the National Society of Children of the American Revolution, and pamphlets. There is no order to these materials which were contained in two or three large manila envelopes. In one envelope were obituaries from newspaper clippings with dates spanning from the 1880s to 1986.

From this pile I've found the marriage announcement of Baker White Armstrong, my husband's great-grandfather who moved from Salem, Virginia, to Texas in the 1880s, as well as Baker Armstrong's obituary.  With these first two entries in my Left for Texas blog, I illustrate the fleetingness of the life of man. Between that marriage announcement and the obituary lie the details of one life long forgotten except in the fragments that we own. Here, perhaps, over the next months as I catalog these fragments, the life of Baker White Armstrong may flesh out once again--metaphorically speaking--in cyber space. With that life are fragments of other lives that will also be revealed "through a glass darkly."

According to that Applicant's Worksheet, Baker White Armstrong was born December 10, 1858, in Keyser, West Virginia. After leaving his family home in Virginia for Texas, he married a young woman whom he had known in Virginia: Mary Ophelia Nugent, born January 3, 1864, in Prairie Lea, Texas. Mary's being born in Texas was an accident of history, as her family had been misplaced there by the Civil War--more on that in a future post.

Baker and Mary (or "Boggy" as her children called her years later) married on July 14, 1892. Baker died first, in Houston, Texas, on February 20, 1937; Mary died in Houston, Texas, on April 10, 1943. Later posts may be confusing, as Baker and Mary named their  second child (and daughter) after Mary; that daughter never married, and thus she, also, was until her death, Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong. We knew her as "Mimi," my husband's great-aunt who taught first grade in Houston for many years. But that's for another post.