When cancer struck family – and what turned things around

My paternal great-great-grandfather, Richard Payne farmed a large spread outside Tupelo, Mississippi in the 1850s into the 1860s. After a major battle was fought there between the army of the CSA and Gen. Grant’s US troops in mid-July 1864, my great-great-grandfather joined the Confederate Army and wound up serving in a Calvary regiment. Great-great-grandfather Payne was given the rank of corporal going in and proceeded to participate in some of the bloodiest battles that occurred in the final 9 months of the Civil War.

After the war, my great-great grandfather’s boys — which included my great grandfather William Wylie Payne (1862-1948) — moved to Texas. One, Dr. Franklin Payne was a veterinarian who died in a barn fire, sad to say, in some dinky doo town in east Texas. The other boys moved to North Texas where William Wylie bought and operated a farm in Floyd County (Near Floydada where my father was born in 1930). He had a number of sons including Reggie Vernon Payne (b. 1895 d. 1976), my grandfather, who married Nettie Alice Warren just before or right after WW1. They had 3 children — one of whom was my father, Walter W. Payne (1930-1992).