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Details of Henry Wallis Ewing

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Henry Wallis Ewing


(vitals)

Born : 17 Nov 1867
Died : abt Dec 1948

Father : Henry Anderson Ewing — Born: 1841, Illinois; died: 1934, Kansas

Mother : Elizabeth Julia Merriman — Born: 1843, Massachusetts; died: Kansas

Family: : Spouse — Alice Elizabeth Sweet — Born: 1868, Wisconsin.
Married: 05 Aug 1893

  1. Henry Wallis Ewing Jr. — Born: 1894, Kansas.
  2. Abbie Jane Ewing — Born: 1897, Kansas; died: 1971, Texas
  3. Lucius Winchester Ewing — Born: 1901, Kansas.
  4. Lawrence Bodurtha Ewing — Born: 1901, Kansas; died: 1902, Kansas
  5. Private_F code: @I1@ — Born: 1906; died: 1991, Oklahoma
  6. Adlai Merriman Ewing — Born: 1912, Texas; died: 1970, Texas
Events

17 Nov 1867 — Born: .

About Dec 1948 — Died: .

Narrative Article

Henry Wallis Ewing was my great-grandfather. I estimate his date of death from being told that he survived by a few days the news of my birth. He was a dentist but had not practiced in most of his working life, if he ever did. My grandmother preserved a few of his instruments, but if they showed any signs of use, I did not notice when they were displayed to me. He farmed in the vicinity of Iola, Kansas.

In 1903 he was admitted to the Kansas Academy of Science, listing his association with the Iola Gas Company. So far as I can determine, the Iola Gas Company met with failure in early attempts to bring in the large deposit of natural gas that was commonly believed to exist in the Iola area. Whether the Iola Gas Company participated when another company hit the main deposit is not clear to me. But Henry's experience in the gas business may have had something to do with the family removing to Texas.

Evidently they first moved to the Tarrent County area. My grandmother claimed to have been chums with Mary Martin in school (and for that reason suspected that the Ewings of the television show "Dallas" were named for her family, as the show starred Martin's son Larry Hagman and Martin had been offered the role of his mother in the show). This is not plausible if Mary Martin's reported birth date of 1 Dec 1913 is accurate. There would have been seven years difference in their ages — possibly chums in a rural school — but my grandmother reports being in Houston during the first World War, and if Martin were born in 1913 she would have still been a toddler in Weatherford at that time.

The move to Houston would not have been unexpected if, as I surmise, Henry were still in the gas business. My grandmother often referred to herself as "only a gas man's daughter," which was a reference to a large number of risqué jokes from a bygone time. My grandmother reports living the Heights and pointed out the house she lived in when I was still too young to remember exactly where it was in a neighborhood then strange to me. She reported that she recall hearing the soldiers marching through the streets to make transportation connections for the war. I believe however what she actually heard was the militia marching to put down the Houston Riot of 1917, an unpleasant racial incident. Either she was protected from the truth at the time and never learned it, or she sought to protect me in recalling it.

With the exception of Luke's twin who died very young, I knew all Henry's children and their spouses. Luke occasionally repeated jokes about one of a pair of twins dying and the survivor never being sure which one had died.

—Lars Eighner

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Lars Eighner
APT 1191
8800 N IH 35
AUSTIN TX 78753
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