To request a copy of this photo for your own personal use, please contact our state coordinator. If you are not a family member or the original photographer — please refrain from copying or distributing this photo to other websites.
Thank you for visiting the Texas Gravestone Photo Project. On this site you can upload gravestone photos, locate ancestors and perform genealogy research. If you have a relative buried in Texas, we encourage you to upload a digital image using our Submit a Photo page. Contributing to this genealogy archive helps family historians and genealogy researchers locate their relatives and complete their family tree.
Submitted: 5/23/20 • Approved: 5/23/20 • Last Updated: 5/26/20 • R317461-G0-S3
1866 - 1898
The Temple Times (Temple, Tex.), vol. 17, no. 20, ed. 1, Friday, 22 April 1898, page 5
Gone to His Reward
At his residence No. 212 West Elm Avenue, on Wednesday night, R. F. Killingsworth departed this life.
About two weeks ago he was taken so ill he gave up work and went home. On Saturday reason left him, since then he has had but few moments of lucid intervals, and none since Monday.
He was born in Missouri 32 years ago, but has lived in Temple since its foundation. Ten years ago, he learned to set type in the Times office and since then has held a case varying from a month or two to a year or two at a time. He was always prompt, faithful and accommodating; he was a typo of rare accuracy and speed; he had a keen perception of honor and his course in life was along the higher paths of virtue, sobriety and a manly life. While his habitual silence amounted to taciturnity, he was outspoken and decided in matters that affected his own honor or the honor of those over whom he exercised guardian care. Although he was sober, industrious and efficient, he lacked that indescribable gift – money-making, and his path has always been along the way of privations and apparently beset by a fatality.
He married about three years ago a Miss Bessie Lankford, of Rockdale, and, without means, took up the burthen of supporting a family, and after working a little more than a year for the Times, he formed a co-partnership with J. O. Smith, and together they opened a job office, but the closeness of business and the overworked field in his line and the usurious rate of interest paid for help to start his business, caused the income to fall short of the demands, and he permitted his policy to lapse in the Knights of Honor, and here especially does it seem that “fate” was against him. It is a rule of the order that the lodge may carry a brother, who is well, but short of funds, for 60 days, but no longer. The lodge did that for him, but the 60 days expired just one day before he gave up and went to bed, thereby losing to his wife and child eht benefit of $2,000, of which they stand in great need. He had plenty of friends both in and out of the lodge who, had they known his condition, would cheerfully have advanced the money, but his uncomplaining silence created no suspicion of what the poor fellow was enduring.
He was not a member of any church, made no sort of profession, and while living a moral life, he did not live a Christian life. Here the thought gives us awful pause. What communications the soul may have with its Maker no man can tell. The fiat – “Ye must be born again” is more fixed than any law of man, yet by one day he lost the means of present support to his loved ones, did that priceless policy lapse? Was that postponement also one day too long? In this life no man may know. We may only hope that, during the days the mind was clouded to all things in life and while the soul still occupied its clay tenement, by means to us unknown and unknowable, the contrite heart paid the premium that secured the eternal policy.
He left a wife and child, mother and father, a brother and sister, together with many warm friends who mourn his loss and deeply sympathize with the grief-stricken relatives.
The remains were laid to rest at 4 o’clock yesterday in the city cemetery.
Contributed on 5/23/20 by texasfindagraver
Email This Contributor
Suggest a Correction
Record #: 317461