Fon Gentry, Page One

Florence (Fon) Smith Gentry was born on December 1, 1889, in Henderson County, Texas. Her parents were William Jefferson Gentry, born in Georgia, and Monterrey Indiana Burke Gentry, born in Alabama. They married in Henderson County on July 10, 1872.

In the 1900 census, a year before she wrote the Dauphin School article, Fon was living in Henderson County with her parents and four siblings. In the 1910 census, she is living in Henderson County with her parents and three siblings, and Fon's occupation is listed as grammar school teacher. Tragically, nine years later, she died of influenza.

The following are excerpts from my interview with Britt Thompson, who is the great-grandson of Fon Gentry's sister. He has compiled a detailed family history.

"According to my mother, Fon Gentry went to Columbia University in New York, and graduated from there when she was either 16 or 17 years old (Note: Barnard College is the women's college of Columbia). I am sure that her brothers, Dan and Dodge, who were very successful merchants, would have been able to help her. Fon died during the great influenza outbreak, at a military camp near Waco, Texas. She had been serving there as a nurse or public health worker." (My research indicates that the military camp was Camp MacArthur.)

"There were some other tragedies in Fon's family. Her older brother Dodge and her sister Bertha died within 24 hours of each other in 1933, on Christmas day, and the day after. I have their obituaries. My grandmother remembered when that happened and exactly what the details were."

"Fon's mother apparently had quite a penchant for unique names. She named my great-grandmother English Marvin Gentry, but they called her Sybil. The only one of her children who had a 'normal' name was my great-grandmother's older brother, Daniel Burton Gentry."

"Dan was a merchant in Malakoff, and was one of most prominent citizens in the town for years. His brother was named Jerome Kirby Gentry, but they called him Dodge. My grandmother went to Malakoff in about 1920 to work in his dry goods store, where she met my grandfather."

"Fon's father's real name was William Ervin Gentry. There was an incident involving him, passed down through the family, that early in the Civil War, he supposedly tarred and feathered a fellow with help from some companions, and he had to run away and change his name to avoid being subsequently identified. So he changed it to William Jefferson Gentry. He and his wife, Monterrey Indiana (she was called Ann), along with Fon and her brothers, Dodge and Dan, are all buried in the Malakoff City Cemetery."

"In quite a twist of fate, I came back from New York after graduate school at NYU, and I became a teacher. The first job that I had was in Kemp, Texas, in Kaufman County. My grandmother, Margaret Knotts Payne, graduated from Kemp High School in 1918. Her mother and my great-grandfather, Albert Ross Knotts, lived most of their lives in Kemp."

"I write two columns for the Malakoff, Texas newspaper (www.malakoffnews.net), one called Looking Back and the other called Down Memory Lane. I go back to the archives of the paper and pull stories about people and places from my hometown and publish them every week or write original articles concerning the people and places from my hometown's past. In so doing, I have made friends all over the country who want to tell me about their families and their connections to my hometown. I have gotten so much more out of doing that than the effort I have put into it. It's one of the most rewarding things I've ever done."

"Several years ago, in researching another one of my family's lines, named Finney, I found a relative who had many Finney family records. He had my great-great-great grandparents' love letters from 1848 to 1852, letters in which they always addressed each other as 'most affectionate companion,' the term I now use in referring to the love of my life. When you read the letters and discover the way that people expressed themselves then and the hardships that they went through, you begin to understand exactly what people coped with 150 years ago. Addison and Laura Finney were apart from each other for weeks at a time. He fought in the Mexican-American War and the Civil War. He died in 1864. I cannot find any record of his death. He is buried in an unmarked grave. Laura was poverty stricken after the Civil War, as so many people in the South were."

"Fon's family settled in a place called Walnut Creek, which is outside of Malakoff. There were many rural communities around there that no longer exist, and it's possible that the school she taught in may have been in Walnut Creek. The Dauphin School is no longer in existence. None of those places are."