The Tucker Family
Every family is held together by the people who remember — the ones who wrote down the names and dates so none of us would forget where we came from, and who gathered everyone back to Odenville year after year. Fred Tucker started the reunions; Barry keeps the family's genealogy. This page is where we keep their work going.
Jim and Fannie Lou Tucker raised eleven children on the homeplace in St. Clair County, Alabama. From those eleven came all of us. The old stories — the farm, the church, the long tables of food, the way the cousins ran wild every summer — deserve to be written down before they fade. If you carry one, we would love to hear it.
Short remembrances of some of the ones this whole family traces back to — drawn from records, obituaries, and the family's own genealogy. Every one of the eleven has a story; these are a start.
Samuel James “Jim” Tucker (1871–1960) and Fannie Lou Mewbourne (1882–1952) raised eleven children on the Odenville homeplace in the first quarter of the last century. Fannie's maiden name, carried forward as a given name in the Southern way, became the family's “Mewbern.” They rest side by side at Friendship Baptist Church Cemetery.
Frederick Lawrence “Fred” Tucker (1918–2009) — the “Frederick L.” on the deed — came home from WWII (Army, Normandy) to a career with the Postal Service. In 1997 he deeded the fifty-nine-acre homeplace into the Foundation so it would belong to the whole family, and he was the one who made the reunion happen.
Lee Mewbourne Tucker (1916–2013) — the family's “Mewbern Lee” — gave forty-four years to U.S. Steel's Tin Mill in Birmingham and was long remembered at the center of the family. He rests at Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham, the city he helped build.
Lois Tucker Jones (1921–2015) married Calvin Murray Jones and carried the line down to today. Ninth of the eleven, she was the last-living of the branch this family's history was assembled through — grandmother to the cousins now bringing everyone back together.
John Calvin Tucker (1925–2013), youngest of the eleven, served in the Navy in WWII and became a court reporter in Boise, Idaho — the branch of the family that settled farthest from the homeplace, and a reminder of how far these eleven children's descendants have spread.
Barry Wade Tucker is the family's genealogist and the Foundation's treasurer — the one who built and kept the family-code database that this whole tree is drawn from. He descends from Jim's older brother John Thomas Tucker, which makes him a cousin to the eleven children's line. We owe much of what's written here to his patient work.
Remembering the patriarch and matriarch, and each of their eleven children. Most rest at Friendship Baptist Church Cemetery in Odenville, where the family began; a few lie nearby — Myrtis at Liberty Cemetery in Odenville, Lee at Elmwood in Birmingham, Sara Amanda at Jefferson Memorial Gardens in Trussville.
Do you remember something worth keeping — a photograph, a saying, a summer at the homeplace? Send it our way and we will add it to the family's record.