The title and the idea for this book began in 1958, when Mody Boatright first published his essay, "The Family Saga as a Form of Folklore." What Mody identified was a long established form of folklore that was firmly entrenched among people everywhere. The family saga--as Mody and this collection defines it--is made up of an accumulation of separate family legends. These are the stories of the old folks and the old times that are told among the family when they gather for funerals or Thanksgiving dinner. These are the "remember-when" stories the family tells about the time when the grownups were children. Families with strong identities and strong bonds eventually have a library of legends, treasures passed along in the oral tradition. Because of shared humanity and common family experiences, the legends of these old families follow a recognizable pattern of topics, some of which are contained herein. A large and chronologically extended collection of family legends brought together under one cover--or one roof--is a family saga. Included here are stories grouped by common topics, such as Ghosts and the Supernatural, Feuding and Fighting, and Death and Burial. They include tales from favorite storytellers Elmer Kelton, James Ward Lee, Robert Flynn, Archie McDonald, and John Graves. Lavishly illustrated, this volume is a fitting tribute to F. E. Abernethy's dedication to the Texas Folklore Society.

Twenty-five years ago, Jerry B. Lincecum, Edward H. Phillips, and Peggy A. Redshaw published Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist. Collated from four overlapping memoirs, some not previously published, Gideon Lincecum's account of his life as Indian trader, physician, and naturalist is lively and full of insight. Lincecum's experiences of following the frontier in the early 1800s, all the way from Georgia to Texas, were not so unusual in themselves, but the intellect and wit that inform his memoirs make them unique. His scientific articles and collections of specimens, his correspondence with leading scientists of the time, and his six years among the colony of ex-Confederates in Tuxpan, Mexico, offer a first-hand perspective on that age. Lincecum portrays many aspects of frontier social life, including marriage and divorce, slavery, education, religion, the social life of the Choctaws and Chikasaws, medical controversies, and the building of towns. He vividly describes the unspoiled flora and fauna of Texas in 1835 and tells tales of hunting deer, bear, turkey, and waterfowl. This anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Jerry B. Lincecum and Peggy A. Redshaw, offering their insights into the relevance of Gideon Lincecum's writings today.

The effects of the Civil War on civilian life in Texas are powerfully conveyed in the correspondence of Dr. Gideon Lincecum (1793-1874), a natural scientist and philosopher who moved to Texas in 1848 with his family of ten children and settled in Washington County. Having retired from an extensive and lucrative botanical medical practice in Mississippi, Gideon devoted much of his time in Texas before the war to studying the natural sciences and carrying on an extensive correspondence that included Northern scientists and even Charles Darwin. He used a letterpress to make copies of almost all of his letters, and these letterpress volumes, totaling more than a thousand pages, were preserved by one of his daughters. Gideon's letters provide a rich and detailed account of how one individual and his large extended family, all of whom were strongly committed to the Confederacy, kept up with the progress of the conflict and coped with the multitude of problems it created. Lincecum's resourcefulness in the face of shortages included weaving spanish moss into blankets and investigating the papermaking potential of milkweed. He was always optimistic about the prospects of the Confederacy and always willing to further the cause however he could. His dedication to the South often led him into astonishing diatribes, as when he wrote his son Lysander: "It would be a gratifying thing to my feelings, to be certified that every man, woman and child in the bounds of the confederacy had taken a solemn oath that to die fighting is far preferable to submission, and so long as they have life and strength to damage a yankee in any manner or form that they will continue to do so."