Remembering Grammy Frances

A Celebration of Frances Wayne Doggett Smith

September 19, 1938 – May 3, 2002

On September 19, 2026, we remember and celebrate Frances Wayne Doggett Smith, known lovingly by her grandchildren as “Grammy Frances.” Had she been with us today, Frances would have celebrated her 88th birthday.

Her birthday is an opportunity not simply to remember the years she lived, but to remember the woman she became—the strength she developed, the family she loved, the obstacles she overcame, and the generations of family history that converged in her life.

Frances was born September 19, 1938, in Shelby County, Texas, to John Ray Doggett and Johnnie Legene Adams. Her arrival continued a family story already centuries old. The Doggett, Adams, Goodwin, Boles, Smith, Creech, Holt, Campbell, Turbeville, Anderson, Mills, and other ancestral families represented in her family tree had traveled across generations before their descendants became firmly established in East Texas.

Her own beginning was not easy.

Frances grew up in severe rural poverty. Her childhood home lacked many things later generations might consider necessities. There was no indoor toilet during her childhood and no dependable potable water in the house. Rats could be found inside the home. Beneath the house became a place where young Frances sometimes felt safe, despite her fear of the lizards that might also be there.

Those experiences left lasting wounds. Yet they also revealed remarkably early the independence that would characterize Frances throughout her life.

As a young child, after damaging a tooth, Frances went to a dentist herself and asked that it be repaired when her parents had not been able to arrange or pay for the treatment. It was an extraordinary act of self-advocacy for a child and an early glimpse of a quality that would repeatedly appear throughout her life: when something needed to be done, Frances found a way forward.

She learned to work and earn money. She taught herself to sew and became an accomplished seamstress, eventually designing and making clothing for her daughters. Creativity and practicality existed comfortably together in Frances. She could solve a problem because something needed fixing, but she could also make something beautiful simply because she imagined that it could be made.

Frances became the mother of two daughters, Leisa Dianne Smith, born in 1959, and Paula Annette Smith, born in 1961. Her daughters remembered a woman who could be creative, smart, intelligent, fiercely loyal, loving, funny, tough, authentic, brave, resourceful and wise. She could also be hard and unyielding. She did not avoid difficult subjects. There were few topics that she considered unsuitable for honest conversation.

She gave advice, defended those she loved and expected people to think for themselves.

Humor was one of her gifts. So was the willingness to try something unexpected. In her early forties, Frances learned to ride a unicycle, reportedly participating in the Redbud Festival parade. It is an image worth preserving: a woman who had already experienced more than her share of hardship deciding, at an age when many people stop attempting unusual things, that she was going to learn something entirely new.

That same determination produced one of the defining accomplishments of her life.

In her forties, Frances entered Lamar University and pursued nursing. She earned her nursing degree and became a Registered Nurse. She worked in hospital emergency care and also in home health nursing.

The significance of that achievement deserves to be remembered. The little girl who had once walked into a dentist’s office seeking care for herself grew into a woman professionally entrusted with caring for others.

Her life of service extended beyond nursing. Frances became President of the Kirbyville Chamber of Commerce and held office in the Order of the Eastern Star. These roles reflected another dimension of her personality: Frances was willing to lead.

She also loved music, particularly Elvis Presley, who belonged to the same generation. Music, laughter, sewing, family, leadership and her willingness to attempt the unexpected all belonged to the person her family knew.

But Frances’s strength should not obscure the pain she carried.

One of the greatest losses of her life was the death of her brother Billy Ray Doggett. The genealogical records place his death on February 22, 1972. His loss affected Frances deeply. Family recollections describe grief that remained with her long afterward.

Her childhood experiences also remained part of her adult emotional life. Her daughters remembered periods when Frances would withdraw and become difficult to reach emotionally, particularly after visits with her parents. They understood these episodes as times when painful memories from childhood may have resurfaced.

Her relationship with faith was similarly shaped by those experiences. Frances questioned how a caring God could have allowed the suffering she experienced as a child. Those questions reflected her honesty. She did not pretend that painful experiences had easy explanations.

Yet one of the remarkable contradictions of her life was that Frances continued to honor and care about her parents despite the pain associated with her upbringing.

She did not erase the past.

She built something different from it.

The Generations Behind Her

Frances’s story did not begin in 1938.

Her family history stretches backward through East Texas and across the American South into colonial America. The surviving family-tree material identifies ancestors in Texas, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia, with some branches reaching farther toward the British Isles.

Her direct Doggett line moves backward from Frances through her father:

Frances Wayne Doggett → John Ray Doggett → Joseph Marvin Doggett → Augustus “Gus” Smith Doggett → Jesse F. Doggett → Garner Doggett → John Doggett.

John Doggett, born in 1732, represents the Doggett family in eighteenth-century America. Later generations moved through Georgia before Jesse F. Doggett and his descendants settled in Shelby County, Texas.

But Frances was much more than one surname.

Through Catherine L. Smith, her ancestry connects with Sterling William Smith Sr., Stephen Smith and Olive Harrison.

Through Sarah Jane “Sallie” Boles, another branch reaches through William Boles and Able Boles to earlier Boles and Bowles families.

The Goodwin side brings in the Mills, Street, Bird, Priddy and Snead families.

Through her mother, Johnnie Legene Adams, Frances inherited another extensive network of East Texas ancestry. The Adams family reaches backward through Benjamin Franklin Adams, Henry Adams, Elizabeth Rochelle Trotter and Joseph H. Trotter.

The Holt branch includes Brazilia Holt, John Holt Jr., John Holt and Elizabeth Ann Poage.

The Creech branch extends through Aaron Charles Creech, David Richard Creech and Ezekiel M. Creech Sr., while another Creech line includes Noah Robert Creech Sr., Ezekiel Creech II and Mary Elizabeth Stevens. The associated Cone and Colding families add still more colonial-era ancestry.

The Campbell line includes David J. Wilson Campbell, the Reverend Theophilus Campbell Sr., John M. Campbell Sr. and Nancy Ann Cribb.

The Turbeville and Feagin families contribute another South Carolina and Alabama strand to the family story.

These families did not arrive in Texas by a single route. Across generations, they participated in the great movement of families through the southern United States. The records show ancestral connections stretching through Virginia and the Carolinas into Georgia and AlabamaRecords show ancestral connections stretching through Virginia and the Carolinas into Georgia and Alabama, and ultimately into East Texas. By the nineteenth century, Shelby County became an important meeting place of these previously separate family histories.

There they married, raised children, buried parents, established communities and created new generations.

Eventually those generations produced Frances.

Her ancestry therefore tells two stories simultaneously. It is the intimate story of individual families—Doggett, Adams, Creech, Boles, Goodwin, Campbell and many others—but it is also part of the larger history of migration and settlement across the American South.

What She Added to the Family Story

Ancestry explains where a person came from. It does not determine what that person will become.

That distinction is particularly important in remembering Frances.

She inherited generations of history, but she wrote her own chapter.

Where childhood gave her deprivation, she pursued self-sufficiency.

Where educational opportunities had once been limited, she entered university in middle age.

Where she had once needed to seek care for herself, she became a nurse caring for others.

Where life gave her reasons to withdraw, she also found reasons to laugh.

Where circumstances might have encouraged her to remain invisible, she became a community leader.

Where convention might have suggested that forty was too late to begin again, she earned a nursing degree—and even learned to ride a unicycle.

And where childhood left wounds, she tried to give succeeding generations something better.

Grammy Frances

For her grandchildren, all of this history ultimately becomes much simpler.

She was Grammy Frances.

That name belongs not to a genealogy chart but to family memory.

It represents the woman they knew—the humor, the advice, the intelligence, the loyalty, the stories, the toughness, the creativity and the unmistakable personality.

On September 19, 2026, eighty-eight years after Frances Wayne Doggett entered the world in Shelby County, Texas, her birthday provides a reason to remember not only that she lived, but how she lived.

Her ancestors carried their families across colonies, states and generations until their paths converged in East Texas.

Frances carried that inheritance forward in another way.

She became a mother.

A grandmother.

A nurse.

A seamstress and creator.

A community leader.

A woman willing to learn something new.

A woman capable of laughter after hardship.

A woman who could be wounded and still love fiercely.

A woman whose grandchildren would remember her simply and affectionately as Grammy Frances.

Today, on the anniversary of her birth, we celebrate the whole of her story—not only the difficulties she survived and not only the things she accomplished, but the complicated, intelligent, creative and determined woman she was.

Happy 88th birthday, Grammy Frances.

The generations before you are remembered through your story.

The generations after you carry it forward.