Santa Claus

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: Week 44 

#52ancestors
Prompt: Bearded 

It was a dark  and stormy night.

 I've always wanted to start a story with that line, and it really was a miserable night with snow steadily coming down.  A young girl answered the door late on Christmas Eve.  To her shock, Santa Claus stood in the door covered with a light sprinkling of snow.

 Well, it wasn't really Santa Claus, but he had a big bushy white beard and that was her first reaction.  It was really her Grandpa, Mitchel McCarley, who had come to visit.  He rode a horse from Carter County, Oklahoma to their house in Nocona, Texas in the freezing sleet and snow.  

Over the next few days, he became very ill with what was probably pneumonia.  He passed away almost 3 weeks later on January 16, 1916. 

His granddaughter remembered him being laid out in her bedroom for the few days that it took to get warm enough to have him buried in Nocona Cemetery.

When I heard this story it made me realize how traumatic it must have been on such a young girl to first think that Santa Claus had come to see her and then for him to  die and be laid out in her bedroom.

I have heard this story from a couple of different distant cousins. I'm not positive who the granddaughter was. I was told but just don't remember right now.  I thought it was Wanda but in checking records, she was not born until well after this date.  I suspect it was Loda Mae Stout, daughter of Sarah Alice McCarley and Henry Clay Stout.  Loda would have been about 5 years old when her Grandfather died and her family lived in Nocona in 1920.  If you know who it was, let me know and I will update this story. 

Mitchel Wilburn (Walter) McCarley,
born September 1846, Mississippi
died 16 January 1916, Nocona, Montague Co., TX