Welcome to a new series about the unknown, yet unforgotten people I encounter through genealogy research. These are individuals for whom few records remain—many who likely didn’t reach adulthood, left no descendants, and are otherwise lost to time.
One of them is young Ransome Wilson, the firstborn son of Cinth
a Jane, named after her father, Ransome Collins.
Cintha Collins married Charles Wilson in Benton County, Arkansas, in 1872.
Over the next six years, they had three sons: Russel Ransome, Francis Marion, and Robert Elisha.
Eight years later, tragedy struck, when thirteen-year-old Ransome didn’t return home after a Saturday evening hunt. His body was found in the woods the next day by a local newspaperman, J. Van Butler. The coroner ruled the cause of death as an accidental discharge of the young man's gun.
Pineville News 30 March 1888
No gravestone for Ransome appears in any of the local cemetery records. But his maternal grandparents, the grandfather for whom he was named, are buried in Hico Cemetery. It seems likely that Cintha would have laid her son to rest near her own parents.
Sadly, the original Hico Cemetery was desecrated in the early 1970s during a city utility expansion. The stones were removed and discarded, and the graves were shoveled over. When residents learned what was happening, they demanded the project be stopped and the headstones returned. But most had already been destroyed. With no way to identify the exact locations of the remaining graves, a monument was erected, and the few salvageable stones were placed in a circle.
