HANNAH BARTLETT RING

The following bio was taken from page 364 of the book entitled "Rusk County History" compiled and edited and used with permission of the Rusk County Historical Commission.

Transcribed by Claudia Schuster

Submitted by Gloria Briley Mayfield, Cemeteries of TX

Hannah Eldora (Bartlett) Ring, my grandmother, was born in 1880 in Rusk County. Her forefathers were among those who first settled the rocky shores of New England and Lord Baltimore’s lands in Maryland; but her loyalties were to the Deep South. She might have disowned her Yankee forbears had she known about them, for my vision of the Civil War is colored by her stories of her mother’s brother, " who was killed by Yankee soldiers who would not let the family bring his body in until sundown." She would, however, have been proud to claim Richard Cutts, her ancestor who joined the Baptist church in 1682 in Boston, during a time when the established church looked down its patrician nose at the "strange" Baptists. A kinsman of hers, Reverend William Screven, married Bridget Cutts and is credited with founding the Baptist church in Maine as well as in the South. Hannah was a devout Baptist all her life.

The patriarch of our American Bartletts was a shoemaker, Richard Bartlett, who first set foot on Massachusetts soil in 1635. Another Richard, born much later in 1787, came south and lived in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama. It was his son, Daniel Barlett, who brought the name to Rusk County before 1870. He was Mason and a blacksmith. He is buried in Shiloh Cemetery with others of his kin. After his death his wife, Nancy Delaney (Grice) Barlettt, a daughter of Gabriel and Delilah Grice, moved to Hopkins County, Texas, to live with her son, John Franklin Bartlett and his wife, Mattie, a daughter of Hillard Judge Deason and Hanna Posey Blackstock. Nancy died in 1890 when her granddaughter, Hannah Eldora, was only ten years old. Nancy is buried in the Cumby, Texas, Cemetery, with some of her children and grandchildren as well as the first born Ring great-grandchild.

Hannah married Robert Lee Ring at Emblem, Texas, in 1900. Lee was a descendant of the old Lewis Ring and his wife, Jane Hogg, who migrated from North Carolina to Maury County, Tennessee before 1820.

Lee and Hanna Ring were parents of eight children: Clifton (1901-1902); Claude (1903-1976), my father who married Lee Barbee (1901-1976); Gladys (1904), living in Denton, Texas, who married first, Jess Parker, and second, James Haley; Clyde (1906-1929), who married Gladys Gibson; Myrtle (1907-1926), who married Hubert Rankin; Edith (1910), living in Levelland, Texas, who married John Ephraim Hicks; John Lewis Ring (1916-1918); Daniel Lee (1921-1944) who married Johnnie Hazel Rogers.

Hannah often told me of her childhood in Rusk County -- of going to church in an ox wagon and of sittiing on split logs to worship. She was destined, however, to live out most of her life in West Texas, far from the beautiful piney woods, and her grave is in the Quanah, Texas Cemetery. She died on her eightieth birthday, with only three of her children surviving her. To paraphrase Proverbs, " Her price was far above rubies."

Submitted by Mrs. Jay Womack