The Nugents: Origins

For now we will leave Mary Ophelia Nugent and Baker White Armstrong in September, 1887, at which time Baker professed his love for Mary. Yes, they eventually married, and Mary followed Baker from Virginia to Texas, where one consequence of their union is the existence of my husband, Thomas Alexander Greene, born 1958. I will return to the details of the Nugent-Armstrong alliance, but I am now going to pick up threads of Mary Ophelia Nugent's family background. Mary's father was Perry Nugent, still living in 1887; Mary's mother, Amanda Maria Keep Cook Nugent had died months earlier, on January 3, 1887. I will provide details that we have of the other threads of family history (Cook, Lewis, Hardeman), but first I will concentrate on what we know about the Nugents.

Perform a Google web search on the phrase "Nugent origins," and you will find web sites devoted to the Nugent family. The "Old World" Nugents, according to those websites as well as from information copied by my husband's relatives, describe the Nugents' traveling from France to England with William the Conqueror. They assisted William of Normandy in the Battle of Hastings of 1066. According to one website, the Nugent

surname is of Norman origin, and was introduced into Britain and Ireland after the Conquest of 1066. It is a locational name from any of the several places in Northern France, such as Nogent-sur-Oise, named with the Latin "Novientum", apparently an altered form of a Gaulish name meaning "new settlement". The Anglo-Norman family of this name are descended from Fulke de Bellesme, lord of Nogent in Normandy, who was granted large estates around Winchester after the Conquest. His great-grandson was Hugh de Nugent (died 1213), who went to Ireland with Hugh de Lacy, and was granted lands in Bracklyn in Westmeath. The family formed themselves into a clan in the Irish model, of which the chief bore the hereditary title of Uinsheadun, from their original seat at Winchester. They have been Earls of Westmeath since 1621, and the name is now widespread in Ireland. The surname dates back to the early 13th Century.

This information coincides with information from other sources, so it seems to be fairly accurate. My husband's family, through Mary Ophelia Nugent, is descended from those Nugents who went to Ireland with Hugh de Lacy. Mary's grandfather, John Pratt Nugent (born 1792; died 1873), emigrated from Ireland to the United States, where he eventually married (1827) Anne Lewis (born 1807; died Aug. 23, 1873). In the papers of Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong ("Mimi"), daughter of Mary Ophelia Nugent and Baker White Armstrong, are papers about the Nugent family. Included among those papers are hand-written notes titled "Nugent Family: From notes--Mrs. Anne Nugent Edmonds." Anne was one of the children of John Pratt Nugent and Anne Lewis--and sister to Perry Nugent. Here are the words from that document:

John Pratt Nugent came of Anglo-Norman ancestry, the descendent of one of the knights who were associated with Hugo de Lacy in a grant of land made by Henry II in what is now known as Queens Co., Ireland. James Nugent, his father, was in the British Army at the time he ran away and married Aphra Pratt, who was attending boarding school in Dublin. After his marriage with Aphra Pratt, whose father seems to have been a wealthy man, he left the soldiers (sic) life and went to live on an estate in Queens County near the town of Rothdowny (sic)  where all his children were born. They were members of the Church of England in which communion, John, was confirmed before coming to America. Aphra Pratt's (Nugent) brothers held office under the British government but nature of positions is not known. James Nugent's family suffered severely in the Catholic riots, during one of which the home was burned to the ground, the baby in the family having made a narrow escape with his life.

Notes from John Pratt Nugent
"I arrived from Philadelphia, Nov. 16, 1816. Sailed from Dublin. I was in the employ of Thos. P. & Sons while there. They were tobacco commission merchants. Thos. Kirkman of the house of Kirkman and Jackman, sent me to Natchez in the fall of 1818. They had a branch at Nashville and one at Natchez."

James E. Edmonds (Maj. Gen. N. G. U S.-Retired), Anne Nugent Edmond's grandson, most probably, corresponded with Mary ("Mimi") Ophelia Nugent Armstrong and provided her with a lot of information on the Nugents. In a letter dated March 25, 1957, and addressed from 29 Colonial Place, Asheville, N. C., cousin James wrote the following:

Dear Mary Nugent Armstrong
Cousin Mary
Years ago I picked up in a Washington second hand book store, a biography of one ROBERT LORD NUGENT; a brilliant, fortune-hunting, politician and place-hunter of the 18th Century. I did so, more or less to tease my straight-laced mother. I only glanced at the book, by a man named Claude Nugent.

But the other day, re-ordering my older books, I found in the volume--unread by me hitherto--an account of the Nugent tribe from the first comer from England in the long ago, down to the mid-18th century; and, a singularly interesting lot of chronic rebels, adventurers, and turbulent country gentlemen.

The names Richard, Robert, William recur and recur...

Of course, over more than 700 years there were many split-offs and there are Nugents of all sorts and kinds in Ireland and here in the United States, of other lines than ours.

But, I feel sure that the 18th Century gap between our known ancestor, James Nugent of the 19th Regiment of Foot, who married Aphra Pratt and settled down at Rathdowney in the 1770s or '80s--and the Nugents of the senior line of Westmeath, could be filled in by any competent genealogist in Dublin.

If you like, I'll send you a copy of the material in the old book

By the way: Have you any trace of any Nugent descendents (sic) of Judge Thomas H. Nugent, your-great-uncle who flourished in Texas about 60 years ago and lived (I believe) in Palestine?

Cordially, James

Cousin James Edmonds evidently followed through with his promise to send some of that material from the book by Claude Nugent, for in Mimi's papers are several typed pages of information on the Nugents. I will not reproduce all the information James Edmonds includes about the Nugents (beginning with Hugh de Lacy and his Nugent companions in Ireland). Instead, I will pick up here:

All these Nugents plainly shifted from the Royalist Catholic Nugents of Westmeath when William and Mary won the Irish wars in the 1690s and Queen Anne succeeded, and the Stuarts went into final eclipse. So;;;;: we come to:

Lieutenant JAMES NUGENT, who served in His Majesty's 19th Regiment of Foot, during the Seven Years War and was captured by the French at the fighting over some channel (Belle Isle) islands. By family legend, he persuaded schoolgirl Aphra Pratt, daughter of a well-to-do Protestant landowner of near Rathdowney, to elope with him from her boarding school in Dublin. He quit the army in 1771 after serving since 1775, and went to the family estate, in what is Queen's County. The Pratts were office-holders under the English government and Rathdowney was the site of a considerable Protestant community. By family legend, the Nugent-Pratt family suffered severely during the Catholic riots in the late 1700s; one of the homes was burned, and a baby in that family was saved by his nurse who climbed out of a window with him.

James Nugent, the ex-soldier, sired:

• James Nugent, the eldest, date of birth not noted, married 1804, and "lived and died in Ireland." His emigrant younger brother long later wrote, "my last letter from him in 1852." Probably born circa 1773 or 5. (When Cynthia and I visited Rathdowney in 1936, no Nugent trace remained nor could we, on our brief visit, locate the site of the Pratt-Nugent homestead in the country)...
• Robert Nugent, born 1777, "came to America when old"...
• George Nugent, about whom no statistic or word...
• Perry Nugent, who came to the United States, married, left a son who never married... and then...
• John Pratt Nugent, youngest and son of his father's later years, born 1792, and the ancestor of the Nugents who were my maternal uncles, aunts, and cousins in my boyhood and young manhood... and some of the cousins my dearest kin into my maturity and middle and old age... He sailed from Dublin in 1816, spent seven weeks at sea, arrived in Philadelphia, November 16, 1816. Two years later he was sent, as he relates, by "Thomas Kirkman of the house of Kirkman and Jackson" to their branch at Natchez, Mississippi. There, the young Irishman seems to have prospered. He removed to the then territorial capital of Washington, married a Miss Forman, fathered a daughter, Katherine. This wife died young and soon. Eight years after his arrival... the lovely Anne Lavinia Lewis, daughter of Judge Seth Lewis of Opelousas, Louisiana, was attending the Elizabeth Academy for Young Ladies--the first chartered institution of higher learning for women in the United States!---She saw the handsome young widower riding by on his handsome horse, and he saw the lovely girl, fifteen years his junior. They met...and in 1827 they married...Later, probably with the encouragement of Judge Seth Lewis...the couple re[settled in] St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, became planters instead of merchants and reared the family there until the tragedy of the Civil War."

And so we have the history of the Nugents from whom Mary Ophelia Nugent was descended, and from her, my husband and his sister. We have in the family papers letters written by John Pratt Nugent to his sons and a few letters written by Anne Lavinia Lewis Nugent. With those, I will pick up the story of the Nugents in Louisiana.

Baker White Armstrong: "The Happiest Man in Texas"

On August 20, 1887, Louisa Tapscott White Armstrong passed away. Her son Robert had returned to Virginia from Texas earlier in the summer and was at "Edgewood," the family home, those months while Louisa weakened. Her oldest son, Baker White Armstrong, returned to Virginia, also, but we do not know if he returned in time to see his mother alive, though we do have Louisa's family Bible with the inscription indicating that Louisa gave the Bible to him on the day she died. Baker's visit was short, for by September 1st, he had written his father to let him know that he and Robert had arrived safely in Bryan, Texas. But more than a funeral transpired during that visit to Virginia.

The family of Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr.,  had been acquainted with the Perry Nugent family at least since Perry moved his family from New Orleans to Salem, Virginia, in about 1878.  Perry Nugent had made his money in New Orleans, where he reared   his children before buying "Longwood" plantation in Salem. The Nugent girls were friends with the Armstrong girls. (The photo top left is of Mary Ophelia Nugent, 1879.) Armstrong letters suggest that the girls had attended school together at some time. In a letter to her brother Baker--dated Sept. 6, 1883--Janie had written:

Mr. & Mrs. Nugent, Mary & Paul were out to see us yesterday for the first time this summer. I had seen Mary only once & then only to speak to her, since Commencement and was glad to see her. Since brother Jimmie's death we have not felt like visiting anybody or going any place & that is why we have not been to see her. None of us girls being dressed in mourning it makes us feel so badly to go any place to see any body, that we just feel like staying home.... Mary Nugent is very anxious to go to Hollins this next session to take music but I believe her mother has not yet decided what she will do. They will remain here all winter and Paul will go to Mr. Dabney's school, at Mr. David Shank's old place....

Mary Nugent was also best friends with Katie Dosh, a cousin of the Armstrongs, a friendship that was to last a lifetime. [Katie Dosh was the daughter of Thomas W. Dosh and Kate Baker Brown.] The Nugent girls are mentioned again and again over the years: in a letter dated July 8, 1885, Edward wrote his son Baker that "Katie Dosh and Miss Mary out to see & help the girls on Monday & will I suppose stay several days yet." And Robert described some of the great parties at Longwood over which Mary and her sisters presided. (The photo above right is of Mary Ophelia Nugent, c. 1883-1884.)

But also mentioned over the years are the beaus that Mary Nugent had, particularly John Chalmers. The impression that all these descriptions give is that the Nugents were very stylish, social, well-educated, and talented. (Mary was known for her singing and playing.)

Some time, however, between the parties and the months away at Augusta Female Seminary (Mary) or Texas (Baker), Mary Ophelia Nugent and Baker White Armstrong fell in love. But the feelings between the two were a secret for a while, for Janie wrote her brother Baker on October 20, 1887, practically begging him to tell the family the details so that they could be open with Mary: "By the by we all are waiting very patiently for the answer to my question & when are you going to write. Mary seems so very bright & happy & knowing as much as we do of course it does us good to see her so. We are much crazy for you to answer our question & for her to know you have done it so she will know we know all & we all can talk together." And after a few details about the family, Janie ended the letter: "Of course  if you do not want to tell us what we want to know we do not want to beg too much but it would certainly make us all happy to hear it all from your lips."

What Janie could not know was that Mary probably carried in her pocket Baker's declaration, a little folded packet marked "B. W. A. Strictly Private," with the date 9/9/87. These words indicate some of Baker's emotional state as he dealt with his mother's death and with the love he revealed to Mary Nugent:

My mind has been in such a state of anxiety--then sorrow, that I was unprepared for any extensive exhibition of emotional love, but, down in the deepest recesses of my heart was a love for you that sprang up those 4 years ago and had grown as the years went by, notwithstanding reports of attentions paid you by an other party  and report after report of your coming marriage-- I was uncertain of the truth of these reports until I got a denial from your own lips and then I was overwhelmed with joy at the thought that there was still a chance to make you mine or a chance to try at least--Not knowing whether you cared one straw for me, I was rather rash in communicating myself, but twas the last time I knew [I] would see you for a year or so, so perhaps in my pleading I may be excused for seeming rashly importunate. --Well, I am such a nature that I do not like suspense--I remember reading a long time ago in one of Irving's works a definition of love which was as follows; "Love is the misery of one, the felicity of two, and the enmity & strife of three." Well, as long as I did not ascertain whether you loved me or not, I am, so far as I know in the loneliness of misery an unfortunate "state of misery"--Now to come to the point--I want to know whether  if you love or if not now, do you think there are elements in my "make up" of character that could ever win your love? If you can answer the first in the affirmative, you have made me the happiest man in Texas by thus satisfying the most earnest yearnings of my heart--If negative I can but accept the situation with the consolation afforded by the fact that you dealt honestly with me; for I do not believe in this one sided business in love, and if you cannot give me your heart--your whole heart--do not want you to entrust me with a part--In other words I do not want to be the only one to do the loving--A heart for a heart is my motto to be observed in love affairs--and I would never want a woman to marry me if she could not give me her heart's best affections--Not that I imagine for an instant that you would do that way, for I regard you as the truest girl I ever saw and all I want is one word and I shall forever trust you.

While somewhere in these family letters there may be a written reply from Mary, I haven't found it yet. However, the fact that Thomas Alexander Greene and his sister Linda Katharine Greene Bolano are alive on this green earth, in 2010, is evidence enough that Mary Ophelia Nugent gave Baker White Armstrong  that one word to make him "the happiest man in Texas."

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.