For Lauri Carleton

 Oh My Gooness!

John Pavlovitz has nailed it...see his blog "The Murder of Lauri Carleton and The Killing Words of Anti-LGBTQ Conservatives" (title is the link.)

He says:

"The 66-year old wife and mother of nine children was murdered outside her Southern California clothing store by a man who tore town her flag and shot her to death when she protested. As senseless and shocking as the assassination of Lauri Carleton is, it is not a surprise. It is the rotten, putrid fruit of MAGA America and all it stands for and aspires to.

Violence targeting the LGBTQ community and those who support them is not a random aberration, it is the logical progression."

As a friend and supporter of LGBTQ+ people, I can hardly believe this...but yet, it's makes a stupid kind of sense from congregations/crowds of radical Christians to another crazed man with an automatic weapon. It is sobering to me, friends!

I work to exhibit many displays supporting LGBTQ+ rights in our area, where we have a Pride March in Asheville. I am frightened by this.

Pavlovitz goes on to say:

"Lauri Carleton is the victim of two vicious hate crimes: of the person pulling the trigger and of those who made doing so for that person so easy.

There is no mystery here to be solved, no complex code to uncover, no hidden shooter motive we need to follow down endless rabbit trails to discern.
This is simple cause-and-affect.

It is the grotesque monster Republicans have made because they have lacked creative ideas or noble impulses or any desire to lead responsible for the common good.

By continually chasing the sensational, by relentlessly ratcheting up their rhetoric, by dragging their base to an ever-deepening bottom, and by using LGBTQ people as faceless, nameless political chips—they are nurturing the kind of wasteful violence that visited Lauri Carleton."

This sounds so much like the beginning events of Jan 6, 2021.

The last of his post follows:

"The dangerous words of the Conservative movement are getting people killed.

It’s time for allies of the LGBTQ community to explicitly speak words that love and bring life and declare what we will not abide here.

We often like to say hate has no home here

We need to move this from aspiration to incarnation.

To hell with this hatred."

Richard R. Booth my murdered great grand

NOTE: I am so embarrassed...well Blogger should be! All the comments that have been coming to this site for the last year (and it's not really many) didn't get sent to me as notifications (like I'd asked Blogger to do.) They've been sitting in a folder "awaiting publication" over here, and I never looked at it before today (June 18, 2018) because I was under the impression that I'd be getting emails when people commented.  That used to be the way of Blogger.  Sigh.  I haven't had a chance to answer them, and all those comments were really valuable.  So sorry.

Richard R. Booth was born 23 Sept 1846 in Jackson, Indiana.  He moved from Indiana to Texas with his father, William Lewis Booth, an attorney. The Booth family emmigrated (with William's, brother Charles M.) from western New York state (Farmington, Ontario County) to Indiana and (then in 1849) to Genesee Twp, Whiteside, Illinois, to Hempstead, Waller County, Texas, and Hillsboro, Hill County, Texas.

Present day photos of farm now on Booth homestead, "2nd farmhouse north of SW corner of section 22 on Coleta Rd," Genesee Twp, Whiteside, Illinois

Present day photos of farm now on Booth homestead, "2nd farm north of SW corner of section 22 on Coleta Rd," Genesee Twp, Whiteside, Illinois

Richard also became an attorney...or lawyer.  By 1855 his father had purchased the land for his home and Richard was living in Hillsboro,Texas.

Richard's first wife was Jemima J. Johnson, who gave birth to two children.  When she died the same year as her second child, (1868) Richard didn't long remain a widower with 2 year old WIlliam Lewis, (1866-1940, named after his grandfather.)  On July 20, 1869 he married his second wife, Eugenia Almetta Whitty, in Hillsboro, Texas, where they lived according to the 1870 census.

I think his father William, was living in Hempstead, Texas prior to 1880, though he had returned to Hillsoboro when he died in 1893.  

Richard's son Edwin Whitty Booth was born in 1871 in Hillsboro. The William L. Booth Sr. family home in Hillsboro may have been where Richard was living with his wife and children, but apparently he was working in Hempstead as well.  The top of the following photocopied page names my great-grandmother, Eugenia Almeta Booth, daughter of Richard R. Booth, born in 1873 in Hillsboro, Texas.  They had one other daughter (unnamed) who died at birth in 1875.

The following notes are photo-copied onto his Ancestry.com pages, and give a source of his lineage back to his great grandfather.  It also tells of how he was shot by a man named  Richard Dilk, of Springfield.  Richard Booth died either on July 29, or May 30, 1879, at age 32, in Hempstead, Waller County,Texas.  I think Richard Dilk was said to have been a man he was prosecuting.  (The notes below give date of death in July, while Ancestry.com gives the May date.)

  

Early notes on Booth genealogy

originally by Anna Booth Calder and then by Laurie Mae Booth Calder.

There are maybe a few mistakes in these written records, since William Lewis Booth is said to have been born in Livingston County, NY, rather than Farmington, Ontario County, NY (as Ancestry lists)  I wish the whole page had been copied also, since many dates kind of slide off the edge.

Texas Index Cards, (a source that kept track of Texas biographies I believe,) said Richard R. Booth had been an "attorney 1876-1878, Waller County and Navarro County Judge."  I wish there was access to whatever biography the index card refers.

At one point in my many years, I held a newspaper clipping which told of the murder of Richard R. Booth, which was in the possession of my Great Aunt Margaret.  I can't find any records from Hempstead archives, nor Hillsboro.  I wonder which publication printed that article. 

William Booth Home, 208 N. Waco St. Hillsboro, TX, purchased land on 12 May 1855, (photo 1993)