In My Past
I know you are not supposed to mention this, if you are trying to be accepted as a fiction author, but…I am fascinated by genealogy!
I know I’m not alone either. Witness ‘Faces of America’ on PBS. Or, how about genealogy.com, ancestry.com or footnote.com? There are many other genealogical websites, but those are probably the top three. I’ve been there, done that.
I’ve discovered some wonderful stuff about my ancestors, although I had to wade through a good bit of misinformation, typos and misspellings to do so.
I can tell that my next book is beginning to brew somewhere in the ether. I have a sneaky suspicion it may be founded in the story of two sisters, great aunts four times removed, who led very exciting lives in my favorite time period – 1820s to 1850s. They followed their young husbands from the frontier of Georgia, where the Indians had just been removed, to Texas before statehood, where the Indians were still trying to protect their land and raiding settlers to do so.
Their husbands fought in the Battle of San Jacinto and were awarded two thousand acre tracts of land. These two young families were among the first settlers of Texas. One of the men signed the Texas Declaration of Statehood.
Battle of San Jacinto
Why do I like that time period so much? Because the Revolutionary War eclipsed this period on one side and the Civil War on the other. This was a time when much of the eastern seaboard of our country was still wilderness. The people who set out to tame it have been largely forgotten.
I plan to make sure that some of my folks get the applause they deserve, for loading up wagons with children and home goods, setting out on narrow paths through woods and across rivers, and building communities where none existed.
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I enjoyed your web pages- I descended from an early settler in wiregrass country. Willis King, who was most likely the earliest settler in what is now Brooks County, Ga. Willis came down from bis birth site of Edgefield County, S.C. and married the daughter of a Rev. War Veteran, Nancy Williams, on 31 Dec. 1813, in Bulloch County, moved on to Irwin County by 1820 and about 1825 he was located in Lowndes County in an area now set-off into Brooks County, near Hickory Head community. Willis grew rich by grazing his livestock on the wiregrass, “rounding them up” annually and driving them to the Gulf Coast to market them. At his death in 1857 he owned several thousands of acres of the pine trees and 75 slaves. As I have studied my family, and especially while researching the history of Liberty Baptist Church, near the old cross roads community of Grooverville, in southwest Brooks County, I was very surprised to learn that many families followed the same route moving south. The name of the families listed on the “Marriage Records of Bulloch County, Georgia, 1796 through 1875″ contains many of the people who settled in and around the Liberty Church site and played some roll in its founding. It would be very interesting to research and write of these families as they migrated south. My Willis and his wife Nancy must have made the dangerous journey by ox cart, pack horse and walking. They brought with then several small children at a time when there were no fast food shops,no drug stores, no doctors, no motels, no roads or bridges, no neighbors and not even disposal diapers. There were wild animals and hostile Indians, mosquitoes. snakes and the broad leaf pine, the wiregrass the gophers and the rattle snakes, these coupled with the wild fires provided the a bountiful pasture with little need for care. “Civilization” tried to improve that.Interesting times, then. Ed King
Fascinating! I love to hear about families and how they first dared to brave the dangers of wilderness Georgia. Thank you for sharing.