Tuesday, August 5, 2014

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: #31 Bettie Allen Allee, The Old-Maid Schoolteacher

Joe Allee hated his new stepmother. He'd rather drive cattle to market than live with a schoolmarm. The family legend says he ran off at age 12 to join a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas.

When I look at the face of my great-great-grandmother, I see a very forbidding woman. Anna Elizabeth "Bettie" Allen was a 31-year-old schoolteacher when she married Andrew Lafayette "Fate" Allee and became a stepmother to three children under the age of 10.


Quick drop page from Expressions, ClubScrap

Bettie Allen was the eldest child born to Thomas Allen and Majincy Davis of Beaufort County, North Carolina. The couple are believed to have lived near the community now known as Leechville. However, they were on the move away from the coast and toward the west. Bettie claimed to have been born near Fayetteville on May 19, 1844. The 1850 census finds the family in South Surry (Yadkin) County, not far from the town of Lewisville, North Carolina.

By 1860, the Allen family had moved to Barry County, Missouri, and into northwestern Arkansas by 1870. The couple valued education, raising two schoolteachers and a newspaper editor. Bettie was teaching school in the area north of Dallas, Texas, by 1876. Was that how she met the widowed Fate Allee?

Bettie Allen married Fate Allee in Collin County, Texas, on January 30, 1876. They soon moved to the area of Mineral Wells in Palo Pinto County, Texas, where they farmed and added four children to their family.

Bettie was widowed in 1895. She spent the rest of her life alternately living in Mineral Wells and spending time with her children and their families. She never remarried and was able to claim a pension for Fate's Civil War service to the Confederacy.

Bettie died on March 25, 1932, while visiting her oldest son, Thomas Allee, in Pueblo County, Colorado. She was buried in Brookside Cemetery in Rye, Pueblo County.

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