In 1885, when Isaac Lawson Dodd was fifteen years old, he left Tennessee to come to Texas with his two older brothers, Andrew Newton "Smith" Dodd, and John Barton Dodd. "Smith" settled in Kilgore, Texas, but the other brothers settled in Lamar and Hopkins Counties.
The Dodd family had lived in Virginia and North Carolina before moving to Polk County, Tennessee, where Andrew Jackson Dodd was born in 1831. When his father died around 1850 and his mother re-married, Andrew and his brother James Harvey, moved to Georgia to live with an uncle. There he married Gaberilla Carter in 1857.
When the Civil War broke out, he joined Avery's Squadron, Georgia Dragoons. He was captured at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia, in June, 1864, and sent to prison at Camp Morton, Indiana. At the war's end, he returned to Georgia and moved his family back to the old family home, then known as Dodd Springs, near the Polk/McMinn County line in Tennessee. Andrew and Gaberilla had fourteen children, including two sets of twins. John Barton was born in 1863, and Isaac Lawson in 1869.
John Barton married Sovina Bell McClure of Roxton, Lamar County in 1894. In 1899, Isaac Lawson married her sister, Pearl Ann McClure.
The McClure girls were also from a family of fourteen children. Their father, Robert Wesley McClure, had been born in Alabama in 1843, but was living in Louisiana when the Civil War began. He joined the 31st Regiment, Louisiana Infantry, which was later part of the defense of Vicksburg, Mississippi. When Vicksburg fell on July 4, 1863, Robert Wesley was captured and then paroled.
After the war, Robert Wesley came to Texas and married Elizabeth Ann Gose in 1869, in Lamar County. She had been born in Wytheville, Virginia in 1847. Both her Gose ancestors and her Kettering ancestors on her mother's side had arrived in America from Germany in the 1750's and settled in Virginia. They lived there for several generations until Elizabeth Ann's father moved the family to Lamar County, sometime between 1850 and 1869.
John Barton and Sovina Bell Dodd had nine children: Daisy (1896); Eldenia (1897-1918); Gaynell (1899- ); Willie (1901); Jewell (1903); Wesley (1906-1907); Dorothy (1907); Elsie (1909); and John B., Jr (1911). John died in 1947 and Sovina in 1964. They're both buried in the Mahoney cemetery.
Isaac Lawson and Pearl Ann Dodd had eight children: A baby girl; Julia Zoe (1901-1903); Oliver Claud (1903); Vallie Gabriel (1904); Mellie May (1907-1932); Rubye Belle (1909); Vera Hazel (1910); and Norman Howard (1915-1923). They settled in the Mahoney Community of Hopkins County. Pearl Ann died in the flu epidemic of 1917, and Isaac Lawson died in 1960. Both are buried in the Mt. Sterling Cemetery.