Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/542

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Women of the Confederacy
503


still owned by this youngest child of the Dancy family. She was married in her sixteenth year and has two daughters born of this marriage. Her mother inherited the homestead of her father which was built in Austin, in 1847, in the primitive days of the capital, built by the hands of her grandfather's servants. While yet a very young woman, she and her little daughters removed with her mother, Mrs. Dancy, to Austin where she then entered the University, taking special courses in literature under Mark Harvey Liddell, the noted Shakespearian scholar, who is now editing his Shakespeare under the auspices of Princeton University. She was married to Joseph B. Dibrell, member of the state senate in October, 1899, and is now the mother of John Winfield Dancy Dibrell, born four years after the marriage, now a lad of eight. She lived at Seguin, Texas, Mr. Dibrell's lifelong home until his recent appointment to the Supreme Bench of Texas, when she has again returned to the state capital at Austin, the home of her grandfather and distinguished father who was a member of Congress of the Republic of Texas.

Ella Dancy Dibrell comes of old revolutionary stock. Through her mother's line she descended from Anne Robinson Cockrell, who received distinction in the early days as a leader in establishing the church work in the French Lick where Nashville, Tennessee, is now located. Her father was John Winfield Dancy who descended from the Turners, Dancys and Colonel Masons, in Virginia, and was a direct kinsman of General Winfield Scott, for whom he was named. Being of a romantic nature, soon after leaving his home in Virginia, going to Alabama, he cast his fortune in the Golden West, then the New Republic of Texas.

Mrs. Dibrell is one of the charter members of the American History Club at Austin; member of the Altar Society of St. Davis* Church at Austin; first president of the Shakespeare