To: The Sasser List From: Glenn E. Perry One of the stories I often have heard in my immediate family--and which my mother repeated in my presence at least once during the past year--pertains to an event that occured at the wedding of Jesse and Nancy Gilbert Sasser's daughter Susan to Isaac Taylor (that is, of my great grandparents). It was on that occasion that Wallace Gilbert (son of the one born in ca. 1802) asked for the hand of Mary Jane "Pop" Taylor (sister of Isaac and daughter of Claiborn Taylor [ b. 1823]). It is said that people had considered such a proposal long overdue and that they thought the younger Wallace--who apparently was determined to be in a proper financial situation before taking on such responsibilities--never would get around to putting the question to his future wife's father. Such a little flash of memory over so many generations differs from the hard data one finds in censuses and court house records. It is easy for a story to get mangled each time it is told. But the recorded dates of the two weddings--that of my great grandparents on April 2, 1874 and that of Aunt Pop and Uncle Wallace on May 8 of the same year--mesh very well with the tradition. Admittedly, there may be nothing intrinsically important about the story. It is essentially the way that it has been remembered so long that makes it and others like it interesting to me. The first wedding presumably occurred at the place on Blackwater where the pear tree so recently continued to bear (or possibly at the bride's grandfather, the elder Wallace Gilbert's, home?). The second ceremony almost surely took place at the house where Claiborn lived and where I was born. The latter place is where Susan and Isaac's infare dinner--the term I used to hear from members of the generation born at about that time--must later have been held. And there presumably was a big infare dinner at the Wallace Gilbert place when the son brought his bride home. I wonder whether the slave woman Hans, whose baking people have raved about over the generations and who stayed on with the Gilbert family for a while following emancipation,, was still around to supply her much demanded cakes and pies. Unless I hear that members of the list are tired of the legends I keep relating, the stories of "Old Hans" and all that eventually will follow. . ***************************************** Glenn E. Perry Department of Political Science Indiana State University Terre Haute, IN 47809 USA E-Mail: psperrg@scifac.indstate.edu (812)237-2505 (office) (812)234-5661 (home) ****************************************