“Our Mother is gone but not forgotten”

The newspapers of November 1914 did not print her first name. To the Town Talk in Alexandria she was "Mrs. Milstead." To a second paper she was "Mrs. James Milstead." Her headstone gives the name her children chose:

MOTHER · SEFRONIA HANES MILSTEAD · JUNE 26, 1868 · DEC. 1, 1914 · Our Mother is gone but not forgotten.

A weathered marble headstone on a white marble base, set in fallen leaves. The top is carved MOTHER. Below a border of carved flowers it reads Sefronia Hanes Milstead, June 26, 1868, Dec. 1, 1914, Our Mother is gone but not forgotten. — The headstone of Sophronia Hanes Milstead, which spells her name Sefronia. Photographed in January 2015. The name of the cemetery has not yet been identified.

She was Thompson Hanes's mother. Until this week the Foundation held no record of her name and none of how she died. A batch of family records has now supplied both.

A working mother

The earliest record of her is a city directory. In 1898 the Galveston directory lists "Hanes Sophronia (Mrs. J. C.), wks cotton mill," living on Avenue H. Alvin and Barney Hanes lived with her and worked at the mill too. Her husband, J. C. Hanes, does not appear. The Foundation has not yet found any record of him in his own name, only that he was born in Texas.

Two years later she was back in Louisiana and married again. On June 27, 1900, the census taker in Ward 4 of Grant Parish recorded the household of James Milsted, thirty-seven, and his wife of one year, Sophrona, thirty-one. With them were his son James, eleven, and her children, listed as his stepchildren under the name Haynes: Vinie, thirteen; Alvin, ten; Thompson, nine; and a younger brother, six.

That is the house Thompson lived in at nine.

Dry Prong, November 1914

The marriage did not last. By November 1914 Sophronia had left James Milstead and gone to live at Jena, in LaSalle Parish.

On Sunday, November 29, 1914, she came back to Dry Prong, in Grant Parish, on the afternoon train. A grandchild had died, and she went to her daughter's home, where the child lay. Soon after she arrived, Milstead came to the house and demanded that she go home with him. She refused. One newspaper reported her words: that she "had had all the trouble with him that she would submit to."

He shot her twice. Then he shot and killed himself.

She was alive. On Monday morning she was carried to Alexandria on the L. & A. railroad and taken to the Alexandria Sanitarium. She died late in the afternoon of Tuesday, December 1, 1914. She was forty-six.

Her son took her home. "Her remains were taken to Jena by her son, Mr. W. T. Haynes, for burial at her old home." W. T. Haynes was Thompson. He was in his twenties.

What the record proves, and what it does not

Documented: her dates, from her headstone. Her place in Thompson's life, from the 1900 census, which lists him in her household, and from the 1914 report that names him as her son.

From newspapers: the account of what happened at Dry Prong. Two papers reported it, and they agree on the main facts: the separation, her return for the funeral of a grandchild, her refusal, the shooting, and his death by his own hand. Newspapers of the period got names and details wrong, and neither report gives her first name. The Foundation reports what they printed and marks it as such.

Not yet known: her maiden name, her parents, and her first husband, J. C. Hanes, beyond his initials and his Texas birth. Where exactly she is buried: the newspaper says Jena, but the photograph of her headstone came without the name of the cemetery. The name of the grandchild whose funeral brought her back.

Why this is here

This Foundation exists to tell the story of Thompson and Bethie and their four children, from records rather than memory. That story does not start in 1918 on a troopship. It starts with a boy of nine in a house in Grant Parish, and with a mother who worked in a cotton mill, left a man she could no longer live with, and was shot when she refused to go back.

Less than three years after he buried her, his first son, Aubrey Lee, was born at Dry Prong. A year after that, Thompson sailed for the war in Europe.

Her children put one word at the top of her stone. The Foundation has added her name to Thompson's page, where it belongs.

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