Friday, January 4, 2013

Named after Eugenia Booth Miller

I was given Booth (when being named after my great grandmother, her maiden name) as my middle name.  A second cousin had already been named Patricia Eugenia, so my parents thought that they should avoid too many similarities.  Her last name was Rodgers, while mine was Rogers.  Lots of similarity already there.

There was a long line of famous Booths in my family, that apparently my mother and father  were proud of in 1942 Dallas, Texas.  They were attorneys and judges in early Texas.  They weren't related (that I could ever discern) to John Wilkes Booth from post-Civil War infamy.

However, when we moved to St. Louis when I was 8, I found out that all the "Yankees" knew about him and I preferred to not tell anyone my middle name and explain all about how we weren't related, which I had quickly asked my parents.  How would you like to be a pre-teen named after an assassin?  It kind of put a damper on fun on the playground for a while!

Eugenia was born after her father, RIchard R. Booth, had remarried, when his first wife had died and he had a 2 year old son.
Eugenia had also been her mother's name, Eugenia Almetta (or Almeda) Whitty Booth.
Richard R. Booth, my great-grandmother's father died when she was 6 years old.  He was shot by a person he was prosecuting in Hempstead, Texas.
Richard R. Booth, incidentally, was the son of Judge William Lewis Booth, who did fight for the Confederacy as a Colonel.

Eugenia, as I noted elsewhere, was a matriarch in my mother's family, raising both her own 4 daughters, and my mother as well.  Her husband was a conductor for the railroad.

The Booth home in Hillsboro, Texas.  I found this picture on Ancestors.com

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There is today, more than ever, the need for a compassionate regenerative world civilization.