That handsome fellow up there above was James Franklin Welch. He was born about 1831 in Alabama. Sometime in the 1860s he married Hester Anna Amanda Thompson in Woodruff county, Arkansas. They had six children in Woodruff county, but purchased land in lower Oppelo, in what was then Perry county, in January of 1880 and moved there to live out their hopes and dreams. Then four months later he died.
His dreams, whatever they were, ended with a case of pneumonia in the early spring of 1880. He was attended by both his neighbor, Dr. Craven, and his brother, Dr Washington R. Welch, in that final illness. His brother had to travel down from Atkins, in Pope county, to see to him. That would have been a tough trip to make, worried all the way - pneumonia killed so many folks back then. We tend to forget now, how dangerous a simple respiratory infection was in those days... a bad cold that keeps getting worse, a few days of fever and then your lungs just can't stay ahead of the fluids slowly building up, drowning you. He left a grieving widow and four children: Mary Beulah, William Dexter, Wiley Alexander, and Frank Welch, all of them less than ten years old.
I wish I knew more about his life. He looks a bit sad in that picture, like he knew things weren't going to turn out well.
The IGI has James and Washington as the sons of Edward George Washington Welch and an unknown 1st wife.
