Our Family Tree

license issued 5 June, performed 7 June by Jesse Hughes, minister.
Their granddaughter Erie Catharine Taylor Wilks, daughter of Elizabeth Goen and Arrena Stephens, wrote abt 1950, "Arrena (Stephens) Goen was of Scotch and French descent. Her father was born in Connecticut and raised near Toronto, Canada. He was called a French Canadian. He never seemed to speak English plainly, but always with a brogue to his speech . . ."
Speaking of her grandfather Goen, she wrote: " . . . he had a favorite sister older than himself and her father was mean to her [this was in Tennessee]. He felt sorry for her, her so beautiful and humble. So one day he learned that one of their friends was loaded ready to move to Indiana. He asked them if his sister could go along with them. They told him if he would wait til they got out of the neighborhood that they would wait at a certain place for them to catch up with them and take her along. He saddled his horse that night, and took his sister up behind him and rode all night to catch them. He left his sister with them and got back home before his father missed them.
"Several years after that, desiring to see his sister, he went afoot to visit her. It took him many days to make the trip on foot from Tennessee to Indiana. After arriving there, though, he stayed several weeks, then walked back home. Butwhile there he met and fell in love with Miss Arrena Stephens. When he returned home one of Miss Arrena's brothers went with him to see Tennessee. [Grandpa] could not forget the lovely girl that he had met in Indiana so he decided to return for a visit with her. So he and her brother, Dave Stephens, walked back up there to see her, making the third time he had walked from Tennessee to Indiana.
"One night while they lay sleeping the stars began to fall. It scared them, but watching they did not know what to do or what to think. They thought maybe the world was coming to an end, but after the stars fell for a while they stopped sothey lay down and slept again. Everything seemed the same next morning and when night came again there were as many stars as ever.
"Again after he had been up in Indiana a few weeks, Lish decided he would go home again, but he wanted to see the beautiful girl before going away. He went to town and bought a large white silk handkerchief as a parting gift to the lovely girl. But after he got to her house and talked a while he decided he could not live without her. So he asked her to marry him. She accepted and in a few weeks they were married.
"He went a few miles from her home, and bought a tract of land, and started improving it. He first cut logs and built a lean-to, which is a house long and narrow with the roof sloping one way, and the front side is open. They hung curtainsover the front to keep out the cold and rain. It faced the south. They had a fireplace in one end. His wife made a lot of fine linen towels, sheets, and pillow cases, and table cloths, and some counterpanes or coverlets as they were called. They had two beds up in their lean-to. They lived very happily there for a year or two, then they built a two-story log house. They lived on the north bank of the Ohio River, carried water from a spring on the first bank. The house was on the second bank. They lived between Evansville and Owensville, and when that railroad was built along there Grandpa boarded the railroad hands. He and his boys worked on it. About the yar 1855 he sold out, loaded his wagons, and came to Texas. He settled in Grayson County."