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Jacque Tatum walks through the Mount Gillion Cemetery where much of her family is buried near Center, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026. In East Texas, many families have passed down large tracts of land generation to generation without wills, meaning that today, dozens of heirs may own shares in a property. A group is forming to help them keep their land by connecting them to legal services and ways to use the land.<\/p>\n
Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n
Jacque Tatum, who is one of 95 heirs to 80 acres near the Louisiana border, walks through the Mount Gillion Cemetery where much of her family is buried in Center, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n
Jacque Tatum, who is one of 95 heirs to 80 acres near the Louisiana border, stands near a home that several members of her family grew up in near Center, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026.<\/p>\n
Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n
Autry Tatum checks the mailbox next to a tract of land that several members of his family are heir to in Center, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n
Debbie Bates Turner, niece of Jacque Tatum, who is one of 95 heirs to 80 acres near the Louisiana border, wipes the gravestone of family patriarch Robert W. Tatum, at the Mount Gillion Cemetery in Center, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n
Jacque Tatum, who is one of 95 heirs to 80 acres near the Louisiana border, walks through the Mount Gillion Cemetery with her niece Debbie Bates Turner in Center, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n
Jacque Tatum, who is one of 95 heirs to 80 acres near the Louisiana border, checks on a fallen gravestone of a family member at the Mount Gillion Cemetery where much of her family is buried in Center, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n
In the decades after slavery was abolished, Robert\u00a0Tatum became one of an untold number of Black Texans who bought their portion of the American dream<\/a>.<\/p>\n His 300 acres in East Texas were fertile, providing corn, peas, okra, watermelon, cantaloupes, apples. He and his neighbors, many of them freedmen or their children, would take turns hunting wild boar and sharing the meat. There were cows and chickens, butter and eggs.<\/p>\n \u201cNo one ever came to our house and left hungry,\u201d his grandson, Autry Tatum, 76, reminisced.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Autry Tatum stands near his childhood home near Center, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026. \u00a0\u201cI loved it,\u201d he said of his rural childhood on the land.<\/p>\n Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n This summer, a network of lawyers and advocates, known as the East Texas Heirs’ Property Initiative<\/a>, launched to help families hold onto such properties.<\/p>\n A fault line ran through the Tatums\u2019 self-sufficiency, and through that of other families throughout the region and the South. In 1900, 99% of Texas attorneys were white men<\/a>. Many families lacked access to a lawyer, and they wouldn\u2019t necessarily trust one. So after Robert Tatum\u2019s death, his land, like the land of many others in the region and throughout the South, didn\u2019t go through probate court to change the name on the deed or officially split the property between heirs. In such cases, the heirs inherit a share of the property. Tatum had 12 children\u00a0\u2014 each inherited an 8% share.\u00a0<\/p>\n As baby boomers pass away in the coming years, a big part of their legacy will be the property they leave their children, which has become more valuable as real estate prices have risen far faster than wages. But the Great Wealth Transfer<\/a>, as it has been called, won\u2019t be equal. Land jointly owned by heirs whose names aren\u2019t on the deed, like Robert Tatum\u2019s remaining 80 acres, is vulnerable to loss or forced sale at\u00a0far below market value.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n KNOCKING ON DOORS: Meet the team trying to save Houston family homes<\/a><\/p>\n Enter the East Texas Heirs\u2019 Property Initiative. Many members have their own stories about family land in East Texas. A lawyer, paralegal and forester are dedicated to educating heirs on the law, providing free legal aid and finding ways to generate income from the land to make it easier to keep in the family.<\/p>\n While they focus on land in East Texas, much of their outreach is in Houston, based on the hunch that many seniors living there now come from families in rural East Texas.<\/p>\n \u201cThat hunch has proven to be true,\u201d said John Cooper, the initiative\u2019s consulting project director.\u00a0<\/p>\n Growing family trees<\/p>\n Jacque Tatum, 73, grew up in Houston\u2019s Fifth Ward. One of Robert Tatum\u2019s granddaughters, she would take a more than three-hour drive to Shelbyville with her dad three or four times a year. He would help clean the cemetery, pay dues to the church and visit his brothers. When she played hopscotch with the other children after service, it was different than in the city; they skipped on grass instead of concrete and marked the course with branches instead of chalk.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n In the \u201970s, her dad and two of her uncles asked her to make sure the family didn\u2019t sell the land. In the early 2000s, she began researching how to protect heirs\u2019 property. It began, she learned, with mapping out all the heirs associated with the property and finding a way to make decisions together, a process that would require a lawyer.\u00a0<\/p>\n The grave of family patriarch Robert W. Tatum is shown at Mount Gillion Cemetery in Center, Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n She began investigating the family tree. It turned out most of Robert Tatum\u2019s 12 children had children of their own.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Growing loblolly pines<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Gregory L. Phillips\u2019 phone rang with calls from heirs seeking help keeping or reclaiming their family land.<\/p>\n Like Jacque Tatum, Phillips lives in Houston, where he works as a corporate securities lawyer. His day-to-day involves ironing out the complicated details of company mergers and acquisitions.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a high-powered, big-city job. \u201cMy whole life, I\u2019ve tried to run from my country roots,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n But both his parents are from a part of East Texas about an hour and a half west of the Tatum land, and 30 years ago, his father and uncles asked for his help keeping a 220-acre tract of land that has now been in the family for over 120 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Families often lose land when one heir wants to cash out their share, which can trigger a court-ordered sale of the whole property. (A recent change in state law<\/a> aims to make this less common by first allowing the family to buy out the heir, but advocates say many are unfamiliar with the process.)\u00a0<\/p>\n HEIRSHIP STUDY: Families live in inherited homes. Trouble proving ownership can keep families from repairs and help.<\/a><\/p>\n Phillips\u2019 family wanted to get ahead of the possibility by buying out the cousins who didn\u2019t have a strong emotional connection to the land where Phillips had spent his childhood picking berries and gathering pecans and hunting raccoons among the tall, resinous, sweet pines.<\/p>\n Luckily for their family, acquiring interests was literally Phillips\u2019 bread and butter. He created a corporate structure for the land with clear buy-and-sell language.\u00a0<\/p>\n Problem solved. Well, not quite. At the time, the land was used for cattle. Phillips would get calls in the middle of the night\u00a0\u2014 a storm had rolled through, a fence was down, the cows were out. He was 140 miles away. Again, the thought of selling the land crossed his mind.<\/p>\n But a cousin encouraged him to consider other land uses, which led him to network with several organizations that worked with landowners. He ended up selling the cattle and planting 40,000 loblolly pines through a government program meant to protect rural land from development<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n A tract of Jacque Tatum’s family’s land in East Texas. A new nonprofit, the East Texas Heirs’ Property Initiative, is helping heirs look into ways to make their land profitable without selling it. A common use is forestry through a government program meant to protect rural land from development.<\/p>\n Brett Coomer\/Houston Chronicle<\/p>\n It also led him to a relationship with\u00a0Prairie View A&M University, which asked him to share his experience by educating Black rural landowners about sustainable forestry. He led dozens of legal workshops on the subject, most of them virtual because of the pandemic that was unfolding at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n Which led to the phone calls asking for help.<\/p>\n He searched for organizations to refer them to \u2014 somewhere that specialized in heirship property and could help sort out the legal issues and guide them on how to use the land.\u00a0<\/p>\n And he found a place that did just that, but in South Carolina: the Center for Heirs\u2019 Property.<\/p>\n He convinced the nonprofit to help launch a sister organization in East Texas, and together they won a five-year grant to do so.<\/p>\n Growing a nonprofit for East Texas heirs<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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