James Doby Young

Through his mother Florence Jewell Langran, James descended from Revolutionary War patriot John Mosley Montgomery, who served in the Southern Department during the struggle for independence. That line traced westward across six generations—from North Carolina through Tennessee and Missouri to Kentucky, finally settling in North Texas by the 1860s.

Through his father Joseph Marion Young, James descended from Antone Young, a Prussian immigrant who arrived in America in the mid-1800s and made his way to Texas. These two streams—colonial patriots and nineteenth-century immigrants—met in Cleburne, where both the Langran and Young families had settled by the early twentieth century.

This dual heritage was not unusual in early twentieth-century Texas. The state represented America's promise: that Revolutionary War descendants and German immigrants, Mexican settlers and Southern transplants, could all build lives together in a place defined more by future possibility than by past divisions.

James Doby Young was born on March 10, 1915, in Cleburne, Texas, a railroad town in Johnson County about forty miles south of Fort Worth. His father Joseph Marion Young worked to establish the family in the community, building on the foundation his own father Antone had laid after arriving from Prussia decades earlier.

James's childhood was shaped by the rhythms of Central Texas life—the cattle business, the railroad, the agricultural economy that sustained small-town Texas in the early twentieth century. But when James was just fifteen years old, his father Joseph died suddenly in 1930. The loss came during the first hard years of the Great Depression, when a boy's transition to manhood often arrived sooner than expected.

At an age when many boys were still in school, James found himself stepping into adult responsibilities. The experience of losing his father young and taking on family obligations during the Depression would shape his approach to business, family, and the value of building something that would last beyond one generation.

James's personal life reflected a pattern not uncommon in mid-century Texas. His first marriage to Lenore Arnett Young produced at least one daughter, but the marriage ended in divorce in the early 1950s when their daughter was still young.

He subsequently married Ruby Louise Stubblefield, with whom he had his son James "Jimmy" Doby Young Jr. in 1951. This second family remained in Cleburne, where James Jr. grew up working in the family businesses and eventually took them over, continuing the cattle, trucking, and real estate operations into the twenty-first century.

The complexity of James's family life—children from different marriages, relationships maintained or lost across the years—speaks to the human reality behind the genealogical facts. His grandson Noel did not know him growing up, a distance that reflected both geography and the complications that divorce brought to families in that era.