Price, Lucie Clift, 1900-1983

Lucie Clift Price: Lucie Clift Price was born in Davis, Oklahoma (then Indian Territory) on 27 August 1900, the elder child of William Henry Clift (1871-1935) and Ellen Dunn Clift (1876-1907). Both parents had originally been teachers, and had met in 1895 in Pottsboro, Texas, where Will Clift had been principal and Maggie Dunn taught elocution at the local school. The story of their romance is documented in a series of letters exchanged in 1896 and 1897 which were published by their daughter as Monuments of the Past: Letters of Maggie Dunn and William Henry Clift (Austin: Privately printed, 1976).

Not long after their marriage in 1897 both parents discontinued teaching and moved to Oklahoma, where Will Clift began a career in business. A second child, Charles Henry Clift (1903-1977) was born near Hastings, Oklahoma. After the death of Maggie Clift at Hastings in 1907, Lucie Clift lived with her maternal grandparents in Austin, Texas, where she graduated from high school. After attending a girl's finishing school, Martha Washington College, in Abingdon, Virginia, Lucie Clift returned to Austin for two years at the University of Texas before transferring to the University of Missouri at Columbia, where she received a B.A. degree in 1922.

On 2 June 1923, Lucie Clift married Pinckney Bryan Price (1898-1965), a highway engineer, in Sulphur Springs, Texas. They lived in Bonham and in other towns to which his business took him. They had three children: Pinckney Clift Price, born in 1924 in Bonham, Texas; William Henry Price, born at Paris, Texas in 1927; and Nancy Ellen Price, born in 1930 at Fort Smith, Arkansas.

In 1940, Lucie and Pinckney Price were divorced (they remarried in 1963) and she began a more than twenty-year period of employment in state government in Austin. Except for a brief period after her remarriage to Pinckney Price, when they lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, Lucie Price lived in Austin until her death there on 9 September 1983. In 1945, the first of Lucie Price's children married; in the decade that followed, her two other children married, and the first four of her ten grandchildren were born. It was perhaps not coincidental that her interest in family ancestry intensified at this time and that she had somewhat more leisure to pursue that interest. What began as an interest became a full-fledged occupation.

In the course of investigating her own family's ancestry, Lucie Price developed very considerable skills as a genealogical researcher, becoming an historian as well as a genealogist in the process. This development is well documented in her family genealogical papers. Lucie Price's genealogical interests extended well beyond her own ancestry. In the decades following her initial genealogical researches, she became an active, well-known, as well as out-spoken, figure involved in many genealogical interests and causes. She corresponded with hundreds of persons in almost every state and was active in a variety of genealogical projects, compiling for instance Travis County, Texas Marriage Records 1840-1882 (Austin: Privately printed, 1973) and assembling research materials on Bill Longley, an early Texas desperado. Neither the book on Travis County marriages nor the Longley research materials are included in this collection, though the Longley materials are also held by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. The Lucie Price Genealogical Papers comprise only the research materials she assembled in tracing her own family's ancestry through three primary family lines: Clift (her father), Dunn (her mother), and Price (her husband). She produced a book on a Dunn family line: Ballinger: Richard, Joseph, John Logan of Virginia, Kentucky, Texas (Austin: Privately printed, ca. 1970). A book on the Price family, Price Family Recollections, incomplete at the time of her death, is being posthumously published by her family.

William Preston Longley: William Preston Longley, the outlaw known as Wild Bill Longley, was born in Texas on October 6, 1851. He murdered 32 individuals and committed other crimes in five Texas counties as well as in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory. He was hanged in Giddings, Texas, on October 11, 1878, on a murder charge after escaping death in an earlier hanging attempt.

Lucie Price expresses gratitude to Deolece Parmalee for help in collecting the Longley materials.

From the guide to the Lucie Clift Price Papers, 1838-1983, (Dolph Briscoe Center for American HistoryThe University of Texas at Austin)