The lineage of some of our early families is not as apparent and well-known as others because instead of several sons to carry on the family name, they had all or mostly daughters. One such family is that of George Washington Eager, an early resident of Catrons Creek. Born Oct. 23, 1803, in Wythe Co., Va. He was the son of John Eager, a veteran of the Revolutionary War. On Feb. 5, 1829, a week before her 18th birthday, he married Sally, daughter of John Clark. Their first four children were born there in Wythe Co., Va. They migrated to southeast Kentucky, settling on Catrons Creek where the remainder of their children were born.

Of their 10 children, only two were sons, William, born in Virginia in 1838, and George Washington, Jr., born on Catrons Creek in 1850. William died in his teens and George was the only son left to carry on the family name. He also fathered mostly daughters. Of the eight daughters, all but one married and had children. The one exception was Rebecca Ann who was born Sep. 14, 1842, just before or after the family's move to Harlan. In the crude terms of the 1850 census takers, she was an idiot, a rather broad category that covered any form of mental impairment. Whatever her deficiency, Rebecca Ann was apparently well cared for by her family without county assistance as her name has not been found on any of the lists for county payments for the upkeep of the impaired.

The oldest daughter, Mary, was born in 1832. She married James Jones. The second oldest daughter, Letitia, was born in 1837 and married in 1863 to Edward Sanders King from North Carolina. Eliza Jane Eager was born in 1840 and before her death in 1886, married twice. First, in 1857, she wed John B. Lyttle and second, in 1873, to W. F. M. Wilson. Esther, five years younger than Eliza Jane, married Nathan Woodard in 1866.

Sarah Amanda Eager was born in 1848. She was a milliner by trade and in 1871 married Henry Clay Rice. She died in 1884 after bearing him five children. Serepta Jerusha Eager was born March 15, 1852. She married John Robert Rice, Henry's brother. After a brief time pioneering in western Kansas around 1880, John and Serepta Rice settled in the Pineville area where she died the same year as her sister Jerusha. Margaret, the youngest daughter, was born about 1855 and married W. P. Durham.

George Washington Eager, Jr., first married in 1870 to Letitia, daughter of Abraham and Margaret Farmer Skidmore. Letitia died Nov. 18, 1892 and he married for a second time to Susan Jerusha, daughter of Nathan Pope. George Washington Eager, Sr., died Jan. 20, 1883; his wife Sally died March 29, 1905. They and several of their children and grandchildren are buried in the cemetery at Beech Grove, up on the hill opposite the Mary Alice post office, and part of the original Eager farm.