From Proud Heritage, Volume I by DCPA, currently out of print.
Alexander Aiken Thomas was the only surviving son of Judge John Thomas of Dallas County. One brother was killed by a horse, another died in Mexico during the Mexican War, and a third died in Arkansas during the Civil War.
Alexander Aiken Thomas was probably born in Sevierville, Tennessee, sometime before 1823. With his family, he migrated to Missouri, and later to Texas in 1844, where he was given a headright of 320 acres as a single man. He met and married Mary Elizabeth Armstrong, daughter of James Lapsley Armstrong, another early settler of Dallas County. This marriage was performed in January, 1849.
Six daughters were born of this union. Since there were no sons, the girls gave themselves boyish nicknames, which stuck so well in the minds of their offspring that one can hardly remember what their given names really were. The oldest was Carolyn L. “Cannie”, who became Mrs. Joseph W. Record. Ellen, the second, never married. After the death of Joe Record, she lived with Cannie on Ross Avenue. (Cannie once stood off the Sheriff’s department when they tried to evict her from her home for failure to pay taxes. She sat on the stoop with a loaded double barrelled shotgun – at an age somewhere over eighty. She won the argument that the property had been given tax-free status as an inducement to her husband to pledge allegiance to the United States following the Civil War.) Josephine Augusta married Thomas Sloss Baird. She was “Dick.” “Dude” married T. P. Roberts who was a gambler who, it is alleged, went to prison for another man’s crime. He distinguished himself by saving several lives in a fire at the prison laundry and losing his own life in the process. “Dude” was Sarah. Emma D. Thomas, “Bud,” married O. M. Smith and lived on East Side Drive in old East Dallas in a home with slave quarters in the back yard. Mollie was the youngest; she became Mrs. T. B. Salmon.
When the Dallas County Pioneer Association was first formed on 13 July 1875, Alexander Aiken Thomas and his wife were among the charter members.
By W. D. Baird, Dallas