Notes for THOMAS
G. RICHARDSON
III:
When Thomas started
planning to leave the family home in Iowa, his parents, brothers and sisters
tried to change his mind about going west.
When he wouldn't change his mind, his dad, Thomas II, gave him a good
team of horses and a wagon sot that he could better make his way.
Like many people, not just young ones, he failed to write to them - for
years and years, the family at home didn't know where he went.
Tom had to have had an
idea where he was going, because he ended up at the home of his mother Flora's
brother, Washington Wesley Harvey, who had homesteaded north of Inavale,
Nebraska. His maternal
grandparents, John S. Harvey (3-10-1818) and Elizabeth Bradbury Cooms
(6-24-1818) had also homesteaded in the same general area.
By the time he arrived at the home of his uncle in Nebraska, the uncle
had died in Arizona in 1883 of smallpox.
On May 5, 1890, Etta
Mae Harvey married Thomas Goldsmith Richardson III; this was a first cousin
marriage. They lived in a dugout on
the homestead of W.W. Harvey (deceased) and Effie Vokes Harvey, his widow.
That is where their oldest son, Harvey Richardson, was born. Thomas and
his wife, Etta Harvey Richardson, and their young son left Nebraska for South
Dakota, where he took up a homestead near Kennebec in South Dakota.
Harvey was 19 years old when his sister was born;
by the time Harvey was 20, the family moved to Lewistown, Montana area.
Tom and Harvey started freighting with a wagon and four horses.
There was wheat to be moved to the elevators.