Thank you for posting this info about the photo of Robert Dabbs in his yearbook!!! I will try to find it online. If someone already has the link, would you please post or send it to me.
Thank you very much!!!
Dale

Again my query #1400 responding to William Blair's query on Genforum April 20, 2009

William,

I would really like copies of the photos you have. There is a great possibility that my family members could be mixed up in there with yours. We share common ancestors and I would love to have photos of them. If anyone else who reads this message has photos of any Crutchers, they could very well be the people that I am praying I find out what they looked like.

I have been going page by page on all my info on the James Richard Dabbs family since I found your query. Most of the Robert Woodville family lived and died in Dallas Co, TX, but there are times, I have found, when some of the family members went back and forth between Ellis Co and Dallas Co.

I know that Mattie Mae Dabbs was born in Ellis Co because it is listed in her obit. It would seem to me that the photo of the man, wife, 3 daughters, and one son probably was Robert Woodville Dabbs, Margaret, Emma, Louella, Mary J, and Robert Ethebridge, that would fit the photo that you describe, but it would seem to be closer to the end of the 1880s. He had quite a lot of sons by 1879, but it seems that most of them died before he and his wife moved to TX between the years Oct 1884 and Sept 1886. It looks like this family may have come to Ellis Co from KY and then moved elsewhere, but that is just a guess on my part.

This Robert Ethebridge Dabbs, born 1884, and could be the child in the photo marked as Master Robie Dabbs. He would be the grandson of Catherine and James Richard. Through census records we know that Gran Mama was alive back in KY in the 1880s.

Sitting down and going through my info page by page has really helped me clarify things in my mind. By doing this, I now realize that my great-grandfather, who is nephew of James Richard Dabbs and first cousin to Robert Woodville Dabbs, was living in Ellis County around the same time as these people. My great-grandfather's daughter, Mary Lou, married August 1887 there in Ellis County. When I went to the courthouse to obtain a copy, the original was still there, and the clerks gave it to me. That happened also when I went to the Ellis Co courthouse to get a copy of my grandfather's marriage license. That original marriage license had been laying on a shelf in that courthouse for 99 years. I was never more shocked to have that happen to me twice.

Searching family history is so much fun, interesting, and satisfying. I have been putting my family back in the history books. They were lost to the world until I decided to quit talking about finding our missing link and getting to work and doing it. I was afraid that I would not be able to find out who my family was, but the main puzzle piece was found and other pieces are dropping in place quite frequently!

If anyone who posted a query with William's message, would you get back with me. Maybe William is through doing family history. If he sent you photos, would you share copies of them with me. I just wish I had found this post sooner, but I did not even begin genealogy until 2001!!!

Thanks,
Dale