Ancestry Magazine

Sorting out three Sam Cunninghams over multiple generations is sure to cause confusion to any family historian.

Researching my husband’s family history has been an adventure. My husband and I started with family stories, and then combined the use of online resources with visits to historical libraries and museums. We faced several challenges, not the least of which was how common our family name is—Cunningham. After a bit of initial difficulty, we were able to zero in on our Cunninghams.

My husband was born Samuel Preston Cunningham III (Sam3), and he was delivered by his grandfather, the first Samuel Preston Cunningham (Sam1), who was a physician. When my husband was two years old, his father Samuel Preston Cunningham, Jr. (Sam2), was hit by a train in Houston, Texas, and killed, leaving behind a widow with three small children. His wife eventually remarried and had three additional children. As Sam3 grew up, he only knew anecdotal information about the Cunningham family, gleaned mainly from the Cunningham aunts.

One aunt, Jessie Cunningham Wilson, spent a large part of her life writing a novel, which she said was based on family history. Jessie said that she spent a lot of time and money researching the family’s history. She showed parts of her book to Sam3 years ago, but the location of the completed manuscript was a mystery after Jessie died.

Sam’s3 mother, Jo, was widowed a second time. She remarried, was widowed again, and lived until she was almost ninety-one years old. In her final years, her granddaughter Cathy Cunningham asked Jo to recall anything she knew about the background of the Cunninghams. Cathy took careful notes. Armed with the family stories, the rumor of a missing novel, and the notes from Cathy, my husband and I began our journey to uncover the true story of the Sam Cunninghams.

I began by doing searches on the Internet, primarily on Ancestry.com. In order to cast the widest net, I entered various versions of the name—Samuel P. Cunningham, Samuel Cunningham, S.P. Cunningham, and even Dr. Cunningham. With each variation, I got slightly different results, depending on how the name had been entered in the source material.

My first strike seemed to be correct; I had found a Dr. Samuel Preston Cunningham in San Antonio. Some of the dates seemed right, but the date of his death was off by two years. My husband and I were puzzled by the inconsistencies between this San Antonio Dr. Cunningham and, Sam1, and after further research, we concluded that there had indeed been two Dr. Cunninghams in Texas, and that the San Antonio Samuel Preston Cunningham was not our Dr. Cunningham. We returned to the thread of information on Sam1. Dates, places, and events in his life began to emerge.

Our family visits relatives in Texas and Louisiana from time to time, and we decided to use these visits for our research. We drove to Texas from San Diego, visiting relatives along the way, telling them about our project and the type of information we were seeking. In Houston, a cousin reached up to the top shelf of his bookcase and retrieved the long-lost novel, typed and bound in leather. I borrowed the novel to retype and duplicate for other members of the family.

We were excited to think that we had found our own “rosetta stone,” but as I typed, I realized that the novel owed more to Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind than Cunningham family history. Most events were set on a mythical plantation in Alabama during the Civil War. Our research had shown that the family was in Texas during that time. I persisted, however, and about 100 pages into the manuscript, I came across a description of the Cunningham family that included the birth of Sam1. He was the seventh son of James Durrah and Margaret Ann Cunningham. The chapter detailed all the children of James and Margaret, listed their approximate ages, and summarized their lives. We are still uncovering factual information based on these fictional descriptions.

On the same trip, we visited the Tyrell Historical Library in Beaumont, Texas, where the family settled. We studied books on turn-of-the-century Beaumont, and looked up census records. After we returned home to San Diego, the staff at the Tyrell Library continued to assist us. They sent us census and telephone directory information, charging us only the cost of photocopying the materials. From their research, we were able to trace the Cunningham family to Antrim County, Ireland in 1679. The genealogical information from Tyrell also confirmed the names of the family as they were presented in the novel.

We visited the Clayton Public Library in Houston, which has extensive genealogical resources, and found more census records listing James D. and Margaret A. Cunningham and their children, including Sam1. We also learned that James and Margaret were buried in the Old Waverly Cemetery in Texas. Old Waverly had been settled around 1850 and was abandoned for New Waverly when the railroad bypassed the old town. At the historical Old Waverly cemetery we found the graves of James Durrah and Margaret A. Cunningham.

I continued my research online after our return to San Diego, learning that it is frequently necessary to repeat the same searches again and again, s ince new information and sources are added frequently.

Then I subscribed to the census feature on Ancestry.com. It was a gold mine of information. The census data indicates which members of the family lived together, the addresses of their residences, the birthdates and places for all members of the household including the children, professions, and places of employment. Depending on the year, other data is included as well, such as whether people could read and write and if they owned a radio.

I filled in my data sheets, and my chronology now included precise places and dates. Since we now had detailed data, we decided that another trip to Texas was in order. We knew that Dr. Cunningham had lived in Elgin, near Austin, and that Sam2 and other members of the family had been born there. In a book on the history of Elgin, we found that Dr. Cunningham had sold his medical practice and his house to a Dr. King in 1892.

As I worked online, I joined mail groups for the areas where Dr. Cunningham lived. One of the people I corresponded with was Ann Hegelsen, who works at the Elgin Train Depot Museum. She said that Dr. King was a well-known physician, had practiced into the 1940s, and that many people still remembered him. She sent me an e-mail telling me that she had located the house where Dr. Cunningham had lived and practiced medicine. The next time we visited Texas, we made Elgin our first stop. We met Ann Hegelsen and together drove a few blocks to the house. My husband knocked on the door and the current residents invited us in.

In their efforts to restore the house, the owners had found the cistern that Sam3 had heard about as a child. They showed us where patients used to wait for the doctor to see them, and which rooms were used for the medical practice.

From the census, we knew that Sam1 moved to Taylor, Texas, so the next morning we drove to the Taylor library. We looked through books on local history and l earned that Taylor was a railroad boomtown. The library staff helped us locate microfilm rolls of old town newspapers and other
documents. The microfilm yielded an ad for Dr. Cunningham’s medical practice, as well as a listing of the family in a pamphlet from the local church. Using the addresses provided by the census, we found Dr. Cunningham’s address in Taylor. The family story was that his wife had divorced him and he had moved away. As we drove the streets of Taylor looking for the two addresses given in the census, we realized that he indeed had moved away—four blocks up the street!

By the time we returned to the Clayton library in Houston, we had filled in a lot of information about Sam1, but hadn’t yet determined when he left Taylor and where he lived after leaving Taylor and up to his death in Houston in 1928. Looking through books and telephone directories gave us some answers. The census listed Dr. Cunningham as a staff physician in Dr. Greenwood’s Sanitarium for Nervous and Mental Diseases in Houston. Subsequently, a telephone directory listed Dr. Cunningham in 1918 as a doctor at the Aviation Camp during World War I. The sanitarium was demolished in 1951 and the site now houses a bank, a hotel, and a Luby’s cafeteria. Since we couldn’t photograph a historical site, we ate dinner at Luby’s.

We still have blanks to fill in, so we will continue our quest to learn more about the Sam Cunninghams as well as other members of the family. We will continue our techniques of combining online resource references with materials from libraries. We learned a lot by visiting the actual places where the family lived. We found that some of our best sources were the ones located closest to where people lived (e.g., telephone directories). We discovered that family stories, though not always true or complete, are good starting points for research.

The reward of our work was the quest itself. We made friends on our visits, both with museum and library staff as well as with other people doing research. We were also rewarded by seeing the entire family react to the results of our quest. We enjoy seeing the interest of the teenagers and young adults as they listen to our adventures in discovering our family roots.

Donna Cunningham lives in San Diego, California, with her husband Sam3. She has three grown children. She recently took early retirement from a career in computers to travel and write. She enjoys using her research skills to solve family mysteries.