170th birthday
For members of the Thompson family
Robert Bryant Thompson was born on October 23, 1850. Today is his 170th birthday.
He was my great-great-great grandfather, an ancestor of my paternal grandmother, LaVera Thompson.
Robert Bryant Thompson — usually recorded as just R.B. — was born in Tennessee. He was the 2nd child of William and Sarah Thompson. Although he spent the earliest years of his childhood there in Tennessee, sometime in the late 1850’s the Thompson family moved to a rural township in Pike County, Arkansas. That’s where he would grow into adulthood and meet his future wife, Tennie Cooley.
R.B. and Tennie were married there in Arkansas on September 18, 1873; he was twenty-two years old and she was just seventeen. They lived and worked on their own little farm right next door to R.B.’s parents. That’s where they had all eight of their children, too.
In the early 1900’s the Thompson family upped sticks and moved first to rural North Texas, then again to a small town near Oklahoma City in central Oklahoma, which had just joined the U.S. as its forty-sixth state. R.B. worked at a cotton gin. Tennie passed away in the early 1920’s; R.B. moved back to Texas to be near his eldest son and grandchildren. He died at the age ripe old age of 80 from complications of diabetes on May 3, 1931.
R.B. was by all accounts well-respected in his community and was fondly remembered by his many children and grandchildren. Happy 170th, Robert Bryant Thompson.