Uncle Charles

I get emails almost daily from Publisher’s Clearing House urging me to use PCH Search for automatic entry in their sweepstakes.  I haven’t got rich yet, so I usually ignore them.

Today, I used PCH Search to look at the family plot at Rosewood Cemetery in Humble, where I found the headstone of an uncle I never knew I had!

Cemetery records show Charles Lee Couch was born in 1922, so he would have been 32 when he died.  A quick search of the internet brought up no other references.

I would have been 11, almost 12, when he passed away. I have vivid memories of family gatherings – Christmas and Thanksgiving – from about the time I was 3 years old, but I’m sure he was never there.  I never saw a picture, never heard him mentioned, never knew he existed.

I do remember being visited by a relative who was supposed to be locked up at a state home for the mentally impaired.  My mother told me that he had sustained severe brain damage in a farming accident as a child and supposedly had the mental capacity of a 6 year old, but he was able to walk away from the facility, make his way to Houston and find us even after we had moved. 

I can’t remember his name – it might have been Charles, but I don’t think so – I do know that I was told that he was my dad’s cousin, not his brother.