My Genealogy Hound

STANLEY THOMPSON, attorney-at-law, member of the Buffalo county bar, was born at Hempstead, Tex., March 31, 1856. He comes of Southern ancestors, and is connected by kinship with two of the best families in the South — the Thompsons and McAfees of Kentucky. His father, Dr. James N. Thompson, born in Kentucky, reared in Missouri, educated in New York and Paris, France, married Elizabeth McAfee, a Kentucky-born and Missouri-reared lady, and settled to the practice of his profession in Hempstead, Tex.; where unhappily he died just as he was reaching the full tide of a successful professional career, leaving a wife and two children — daughter and son — surviving him. The wife followed him, only two years later, to another world; and the son, Stanley, the subject of this notice — then a lad about nine years of age — was taken into the family of his sister, Mrs. James Ellison, at Kirksville, Mo., to be reared. His sister not long afterwards died, leaving him to the guardianship of her husband. He was reared in the family of his brother-in-law, and in that of his uncle, John Thompson, was educated at the Northeast Missouri Normal school at Kirksville, read law and was admitted to the bar in September, 1878. Coming West, he located at Sydney, Cheyenne county, Nebr., where he resided till June, 1887, when he moved to Kearney, entering on the practice of his profession there, where he has since continued. Mr. Thompson’s career as a lawyer is yet before him; his fortunes are to be made. If it be proper in a sketch like this to predict what those fortunes will be, we predict they will be good. He is a man of clear head, sound sense and proper industry; and has brought to the discharge of his duties as a lawyer, a thoroughness of preparation not often met with in young men, even among those supposed to be “learned in the law.” His early opportunities for acquiring a knowledge of his profession, both theoretical and practical, were good; having been reared under the roof and had his studies directed under the personal supervision of one of the best lawyers in western Missouri, his brother-in-law, Judge James Ellison, now appellate judge of the Western district of Missouri. He availed himself of these opportunities and acquired not only much valuable knowledge, but what is of more importance — the habits of a lawyer; that rare combination of student and man of affairs. Mr. Thompson is ambitious — not for public position, but to succeed, to be a lawyer, in the truest and best sense of the word, and we predict he will be.