- Date Of Birth: November 25, 1920
- Date Of Death: April 9, 2020
- State: New Mexico
Margaret Edith Ausbrooks Harris was born November 26, 1920 in Reinhardt, Dallas County, Texas.
She passed away on April 9, 2020 in Hobbs, New Mexico.
She was preceded in death by her husband L. B. Harris in 2008 and her son Jerald Wayne Harris in 1985.
She is survived by her son, Jim Harris, her daughter-in-law, Mary Harris, both of Hobbs, New Mexico, and her grandson Hawk Harris and his wife Leonor of Georgetown, Texas.
She is also survived by her daughter Judy Gramly, and grandsons Denny and Kevin Gramly and his wife Robyn, all living in and around Dallas, Texas.
Margaret’s parents were Robert Lee and Maud Ausbrooks. Robert was a blacksmith and farmer, and in 1904 he and Maud rode in a wagon from Sumner County in northern Tennessee to farm in Dallas County, northeast of the city. Margaret had five brothers (Erskine, Clay, Opie, Lloyd, and Robert Louis) and two sisters (Audrey and Mae).
Margaret was the last and longest surviving member of her first family.
Her second family began on May 21, 1938 with her marriage to L.B. Harris, who had an initials-only first name and had been raised on a farm in the Trinity River bottomlands of Kaufman County, Texas, southeast of Dallas.
Margaret and L. B. lived in a small house near her parent’s farm, and soon after their marriage, the direction of their lives was set when L. B. began to preach in a country church, the Rogers Baptist Church, outside of Garland, Texas. Over the years he was the pastor of a dozen area churches, and for several years served as the Dallas County Missionary for the Missionary Baptist Association of America, creating new churches and overseeing the building of sanctuaries for those new churches. He and Margaret lived in a number of locations.
L. B. and Margaret moved to Hobbs in 1990, he continuing to serve as pastor and substitute preacher for several small Baptist churches in Hobbs almost until his death at age ninety in 2008. Margaret remained in their home, next door to their son and daughter-in-law until she moved to Desert Gardens following surgery in 2016. They were married for 70 years.
For most of her life, she worked as a housewife and the pastor’s partner.
Margaret had five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren and three great-great grandchildren. Their names are Denny Gramly, Kevin Gramly, Lisa Harris, Rachel Harris Easley, Pilar Harris, Hope Gramly, Jeremiah Gramly, Ally Weldegeriel, Emily Easley, and Monti, Vinny and Eisley Weldegeriel. They live in Texas.
In addition, she had many very special surviving nieces and nephews. They are Travis Harris, Douglas Harris, Nelda Robinson, Marlene Crowell, Bobbie Walker, and Thomas Walker.
And finally, she had one very special Lea County friend, Nita Davidson of Hobbs.
Her final church membership was at Bethel Baptist Church with a pastor she loved to hear, Rev. Jimmy Crawford.
Having lived for almost a century, she presented many faces to the various individuals and groups to which she was close. Before the congregations of her husband’s churches, she worked as a quiet but strong support of the messages of love and compassion her husband taught.
To the children and grandchildren under her care, she could be a strong voice for the necessity of discipline, especially in the young but also for her children and grandchildren who reached adulthood.
In all of those personalities she exhibited during her ninety-nine years, she was absolutely certain about the rightness of her beliefs, and she was not hesitant to speak her mind about what a good man or good woman should be doing at all stages of his or her life.
This was especially true when it came to her faith in God and in her commitment to her churches, whether it was a church with a congregation of several hundred in the city or one with a dozen parishioners in the country.
It was not surprising that in the last four years of her life that many of the elderly men and women at the assisted living home said she was beautiful, angelic, or she reminded them of their mothers, even when she decided to tell one of them he or she was behaving devilishly.
Margaret passed away peacefully with Mary, Jim, and Registered Nurse Sharron Salmon by her side in her apartment at Desert Garden, where she received excellent care by a loving staff. Sharron is the best-of-our-finest and deserves a medal in caring for patients approaching the last miles of life’s journey.
Although she had been fighting pain with drugs for some days, when she left this life, she was surely and clearly saying “Thank you” to all those she had known in Hobbs as a near-centenarian pushing her walker from her apartment on the third floor, and those she knew when she was not yet a teen pulling a heavy sack through the rows of cotton with her brothers and sisters in her father’s fields of cotton.
