Reflection on Beefhide, Kentucky

Death and Names

As Told by Audrey Lois Wright to Cynda LeTuller

For my family tree record would you please share with me your full birth name & birth date?

Audrey Lois Wright, b. March 16, 1926;

Kinda getting a little age on me, aren’t I?

I never liked the name “Audrey” for there was a school mate I did not like.

Mama took the name Lois from a newspaper while she was papering the old log house we moved into after Daddy’s mother’s house burned down.

“My mother, Nancy Bates, always had to have the best, and Daddy had built the house before Mama would marry him.

After Daddy died when I was 14, Mama and I walked to his grave.

Much later, we stopped at the old house and she showed me my name on the old newspaper.

Two families lived in that house after she left Beefhide and Daddy, taking their children and little else.

About Lois Wright Tweedy

Lois Wright Tweedy has collected oral histories about the Bates family for over 40 years, traveled with her husband and her brother Orville Wright. She has the most extensive collection of files and pictures of any other person in the Bates family. She is a regular contributor to our online magazine found on Medium: The Life & Times of the Martin Van Buren Bates: The Kentucky River Giant.