The Family Farm and How it Began
My Aunt Bill, as everyone called her, wrote down a bit of early family history for us all. While I rarely spoke to her or was even around her as a young girl, she carried the weight of a family historian like myself. Aunt Bill married, but had no children. She and her husband took over the family farm after the death of her parents. She carried a presence about her that commanded respect. I knew this, even as a small child, because she frightened me a bit with her confidence. Many years later, right before the Pandemic, in fact, I finally received her historical account of how our family came to Shawnee, Oklahoma, and the events leading up to this. While her claims about our being descended from the Stephens Hopkins family on the Mayflower, it is entirely possible, given the fact that her last name was indeed Hopkins. I remember in my great grandmother's (Aunt Bill's sister) later years, seeing some Hopkins spoons displayed on the wall. My great-grandmother recounted how