George Harvey Taylor, Suicide Victim

August 23, 2013 — fundraising, grandfather, suicide

George Harvey Taylor

I have found a true treasure today as I prepared to write this post about my grandfather, George Harvey Taylor.  Somebody has placed his photo on Ancestry.com. I instantly knew it was he because he strongly resembles his children, one of my uncles in particular.  This is the first time I have seen his image.  He committed suicide ten years before I was born, and for at least the first ten years of my life he was never mentioned.  I am not sure how old I was when I learned from a cousin that he had killed himself at home at night, his youngest son discovering the body in the morning.  It shocked me out of my wits.  It still does.  The tightly held secret probably had some initial seed of the suicide of one of my cousins in about 1970.

George Harvey Taylor (1884 – 1941)
is my maternal grandfather
Ruby Lee Taylor (1922 – 2008)
daughter of George Harvey Taylor
Pamela Morse
I am the daughter of Ruby Lee Taylor

George Harvey was born in Texas in 1884 to parents who had moved there from Selma, Taledega to be precise, Alabama, after the Civil War.  He met his wife, Hattie May Long, who had been adopted in Mississippi during or shortly after the war.  Her adopted parents, the Longs, brought Hattie May with them to Texas, but seem to have left her brother, Fidel,  back in Mississippi.  After George and Hattie married they moved to Humble, TX, where George was a meter reader for Texaco on a very large oil lease.  He rode a black horse around the lease and read various meters to document production.  They had ten living children;Hattie lost a couple of pregnancies; then Hattie May died in childbirth, along with the baby….at home, in 1932. George Harvey was left to raise ten kids, the youngest being only two years of age.

grave in Waller TX

When my mother was near death and demented I asked about her father’s suicide and how she felt.  She was not in the house that morning, but had gone to Houston to visit her sister.   She said she was very angry at him; the reason given was that the lady next door turned down his proposal of marriage.  He had carried on as a single father for 9 years and was severely depressed, I suppose.  Suicide often leaves the family ashamed like my mother’s religious family.  The taboo subject has strange and subtle effects on those who are left on earth.  I know that it shaped my mother’s view of life.

Please join me in raising awareness and hopefully some funding for IAMalive.org. during suicide prevention week, Sept8-14, 2013.  This 24 hour hot line is created to help people like my grandpa make it through an irrational moment of fear and loathing.  This issue belongs to all of us.  You can find the easy donation bottom here, along with a list of thank you gifts.  My grandpa George and I thank you as well.