TRAVIS D. ROUSSEAU

The following bio was taken from page 377 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, Rusk County TX Coordinator

Travis D. and Julia Iverson Rousseau (Rausaw—1870 Census) and eight children are listed in the 1870 Rusk County Census records. Apparently they arrived in East Texas around 1866 because Aunt Matt Sinclair said she was about four years old and could remember the trip leaving Georgia and taking a boat across the Pontchartrain Lake up the Mississippi River, then the Red River to Shreveport where they obtained an ox-drawn wagon to make the trip to East Texas and Minden where Travis Rousseau Sr. had been living. They camped the first night in East Texas at Buzzard Roost Springs, which is between Pine Hill and Brachfield. Uncle Luke, who was eleven years old, and Aunt Coon Sinclair, who was seven, walked from the campsite to their Grandpa Travis’s cabin.

The cabin in which they lived first is on the Rayford Shaw land in Minden. Later on, they moved over to the cabin, which has been enclosed in the Ida Harrington home. Ida Harrington was the eighteenth child of Travis D. and Julia Rousseau. Uncle Trav stated they would have had a large family if the Civil War hadn’t come along.

There were eleven boys and seven girls, including two sets of twins. Four children died infancy. The fourteen living to adulthood are as follows: William Travis, Lucious Verlon, Julia Ann Sinclair, Sarah Elizabeth (Babe) Birdwell, Thomas Judson (who die at age twenty-one in Kansas), Martha (Aunt Matt) Sinclair, Georgia Texas Sparkman Joseph Moses, James Henry (Uncle Sogue), Dr. Joe Franklin, Aaron Robert, Edna Frances Eugenia (Aunt Jenny) Parker, Christopher Colombus, and Ida Harrington.

William Travis was a cowboy in Kansas, Oklahoma and West Texas. Lucious was a "horse doctor" and also worked on sewing machines. Joseph Moses farmed near Shiloh Cemetery and loved to fox hunt up to a very few years before he died. James Henry (Uncle Sogue) also was a farmer in the Wood Glen Community and a fox hunter. John Franklin, the fourteenth child, became a medical doctor, practicing medicine around Brachfield, Pine Hill and Minden before moving to Beckville where he lived for twenty-two years. Aaron was a sawmill man and served as a deputy sheriff. Christopher was a farmer and a sawmill man living around Granbury. The girls of the family were hard-working pioneer ladies who raised large families.

The descendants of these fourteen pioneers of Rusk County have been occupied as policeman, highway engineers, accountants, department store salesmen, preachers, school teachers, oil company employees, judges, doctors, car dealers, guards, jewelry designers, federal employees, pharmacists, farmers, cattlemen, and bank tellers. Many of them have served in the Armed Forces.

Most of the Rousseau clan have excellent singing voices and love singing "Sacred Harp." Many of them play the piano, and other musical instruments.

This family lineage goes back to Theodore de Rousseau, a Huguenot refugee, who came from La Tremblade, France, on a Huguenot galley ship named "Peter & Anthony". It landed in Manikintown, Virginia around 1700. Ancestors of Uncle Trav Rousseau lived in Westmoreland County, Virginia, before some of them moved to Putnam County, Georgia, for whence he hailed. There are to date 550 living descendants of Travis and Julia.

Submitted by Mrs. John T. Rousseau