Hervey Wilson Crocker is the father of my clan of Crockers. We became a distinct group when he brought his young family across the country to the West Coast. Today it consists of approximately 60 direct descendants (living and dead).

Hervey passed along an oral tradition that his grandfather was Dr. Ruth Crocker . He said that Dr. Ruth was a doctor during the Civil War who traveled by horseback treating the wounded of both sides. Hervey said that he had inherited Dr. Ruth's saddlebags with his medical and supplies in it. Unfortunately the bag was lost in a fire that destroyed their home ca. 1909.

Hervey's eldest daughter, Louise, in consultation with him in 1946 entered her great grandfather's name in her Family Bible as "Ruth Crocker M.D." I have been unable to locate a male Ruth Crocker in any of the records for his lifetime. I have searched federal censuses, indexes in histories of the Civil War, Tennessee in general and Gibson County specifically. These efforts have been fruitless.

However, I kept running across R. C. Crocker and Rufus C. Crocker . The records however listed his wife as Martha and I was looking for Sarah (per the Family Bible). In fact, I hypothesized that they were separate individuals even though their wives' names were the same. Some of their children's names were different (Newton, Norton, Nathan). The same name appeared with different ages (Martha and George). And of course I was looking for a child named Marquis within a Crocker household whose father's name at least sounded like Ruth.

At this point I did not know what county in Tennessee our clan originated. I had heard that we were from Polk, Obion or Dyer Counties. I was finding few, if any, Crockers in these counties. Then Aunt Louise sent me a copy of her birth certificate. In addition to her birthplace, it gave the birthplaces of her parents. Her mother, Sarah Ellen, it turns out, was born in the town of Polk in Obion County. And Hervey was born in Idlewild. A quick check of the index to a road map of Tennessee placed Idlewild in Gibson County. Idlewild just happens to be about four miles south of Bradford, a town I had also been hearing about from interviews with my Uncle Glenn.

Back to the census records and BINGO! R. C. and Rufus were from Gibson County. I began to take an interest in all the Crockers of Gibson County, figuring that some of them must be relatives.

I found a Marcus, age 16, in the 1870 census living in the household of Robert Crocker in Gibson County. I recalled that Glenn corrected my pronunciation of Marquis several times. I was saying "Mar-key'", trying to make it sound French. He stated emphatically that it was pronounced "Mar'-cus". Here was a "Marcus," but his father's name was Robert. Could "Ruth" have been a nickname? But Robert was listed as a farmer, not a doctor. (So were R. C. and Rufus C.)

I had also run across a five year old boy listed in the 1850 census with R. C. as Mart Lee. Could we have been adopted into the Crocker family?

Somewhere along the way I began to notice some consistencies between the censuses. Three points were especially significant to me. First, the wife's name is always Martha. Secondly, both husband and wife's ages make exact ten year jumps from one census to the next. And thirdly, in each census both husband and wife have listed their birthplaces as South Carolina. I decided to put what I had into matrix form. Across the top I listed the information from Louise's Family Bible. I then gave each census a row of its own. Quite a number of things popped out from the matrix.

1. There is a consistent progression of ages, especially with the husband and wife, but also with the children.

2. The birthplaces are consistent over the years for the husband and wife.

3. Martha is the wife across all four censuses in question.

4. The initial of the husband's name is "R".

5. Only one form of the husband's name appears in any given census. (ie. We never see Robert and Rufus in the same census. Nor do we find Robert and R. C., or Rufus and R. C.)

6. There are similarities between the Family Bible and the censuses in the children's names.

7. The phonetics of Newton, Norton and Nathan are very similar and their ages make the necessary ten year steps (give or take a year).

8. Robert (1870) and Rufus C. (1880) are tied together by Martha and George.

9. Robert and Rufus C. each have a namesake, and the namesake makes the ten year jump in age between 1870 and 1880.

10. The ages for Mart. Lee, Marcus, Lafayette and M. L. are consistent. Note especially that M. L. is definitely our Marquis and it is almost certain that Lafayette is too.

11. Another point that may be significant is that M. L. signed the marriage license as witness for R. C. Crocker Jr.

It is easy for me to imagine that the census taker heard "Mart. Lee" for "Mar-key'" in the 1860 census. Then I conjecture that our forefather changed the pronunciation to "Mar'-cus as a teenager, considered Lafayette more sophisticated as a young adult and mellowed out to M. L. by the time he was thirty something.

Is all this coincidence? If so,I consider it to be quite remarkable. The odds against all these similarities must be immense. Or am I stretching the facts to make them seem to fit? Help me. What do you think? Am I missing something? Did I just confuse you?

I still have nothing documenting R.C. as a doctor. Dr. Max Crocker, of the University of Kentucky, and another of Rufus's descendants tells me that he has found nothing indicating any medical training or practice for Rufus. "Medical training at that time consisted of learning from another doctor and some medical school, maybe six months or a year or two. ... I have looked fairly thoroughly in the TN state archives and the Nashville Library but could not find any record for that far [back]. Maybe he learned from another doctor..."

It could be that his medical practice began and ended with the Civil War. The oral tradition only speaks of his work during that period. Could the war have provided the only demand for his limited medical training and experience? Could the war have taken away his desire to continue in medicine? Would he have required more training to continue in peacetime?