On this date in our family history . . . in Grimes County, Texas . . . it is the 19th day of April in the year 1868 when little Maggie Henry succumbs to the burns she received when she fell into a pot of boiling water a few weeks earlier . . . she had attained the tender age of two years, five months, and 20 days . . . Margaret Ann "Maggie" Henry was a great-grand-aunt to the Keeper of this family history blog . . . and from various records, we know that Maggie was born on the 30th day of October in the year 1865 in Brazoria County, Texas . . .
In 1867, the 10th of February, Maggie's mother, Josephine, sat down in Navasota, Grimes County, Texas and wrote the following in a letter to Aunt Lucy Laura regarding her [at the time] only child . . .
Well Aunt my darling sweet little Maggie has grown to be a great big girl she will soon be 16 months old & healthy & fat as a Guinea pig is large to her age she is slow in teething she has but 7 & another nearly out, she can say a good many words very plainly, she has the Whooping Cough now but it dont hurt her her cough troubles her some, she so much company for us all, . . . Mr. Henry & Maggie join me in love to you all . . . Maggie sends Kisses to you all, . . .
Seventeen months later . . . it is the 12th of July in 1868 when a bereaved Josephine again writes to Aunt Lucy Laura . . .
. . . you cant imagine the comfort your kind epistle brought to my sad and aching heart. I could scarcely peruse it for the incessant flowing of tears, tears of sorrow & joy, oh, Aunt words are inadequate to express my troubles, . . .
none compared with what I have experienced this year, I could have given my precious darling sweet Maggie up much easier had she taken sick and died, but to think that she was scalded in a tub of boiling water which took the skin all off her left arm hand & side & she then suffered two weeks in that situation, oh! how it grieves me to think of her suffering & oh how sweet she was playing just a minute before she fell in the water, precious one she bore her suffering so well . . .
I never thought she could recover from the time the accident occurred, still I hoped & prayed that she would be spared us, we done all we could for her tried every way possible to alleviate her pains she knew every thing that happened, . . .
sweet child was conscious to the very last, the day she died she would call her Father & me to her & kiss us not a great while before she died I washed & dressed her sores & she never murmured & when we saw she was dying I knelt by her side & kissed her & asked her if she knew her papa & mama, & she looked at us both as good as to say, I know you both, Aunt I can never forget the last look from her, How much we miss our darling babe, but we know she is happy and its so wrong for us to wish her back in this wicked world, Sweet one, she was too pure too good for this world. she was born to comfort & cheer us awhile . . .
I have lost a kind Mother Father brother & little sister, but none was so dear or near to me as my own precious child was, . . .