When I finished my 1st family history book on the Vinson family I sat there for a few days thinking wow am I glad that is done. Then all of a sudden, I found that I kept opening the book looking for more to do and I realized that I missed working on the book. So since, I was at a point that I really couldn’t do any more on that book unless I received more pictures or information from someone I decided to start another family history. The next question was which family- Whitt, Rankin, or Meacham. Then of course, there was going in the direction of my grandfather Henry T. Vinson’s mother Mamie Mathis or the Piercey family (my great grandmother’s father). It seemed like there were so many ways I could go and I wanted to do them all. So why did I decide to do the Mitchum/Meacham family? I guess the biggest reason is that Vinson was my mother’s surname and Meacham is my father’s so that seemed the most logical.
When I started working on my family tree it seemed like everywhere I turned, I was able to find information on the Vinson family and Rankin family but hit dead end after dead end on the Meacham family. I think this was because we never knew any of my dad’s father’s family including my grandfather. My aunt Ruby Hinson (my dad’s half sister) was able to provide me with a little information before she passed away. She had given me my grandfather James Alfred “Bill” Meacham’s obituary and taken me to Hollywood Cemetery in Jackson, Tennessee, to where he was buried. Several years later, my husband and I had gone back to that cemetery to see the stone again and to take some pictures of Rankin’s buried there. Ted started walking around the cemetery, called me over, and said he had found another Meacham tombstone. It said J.M. Meacham Jan. 19, 1880-Mar. 21, 1949, well I don’t know if you want to call it 6th sense or what but I looked at the stone (which was not near my grandfather’s) and told Ted that I just knew that it was my great grandfather. When we went to the Nashville Archives, we searched for my grandfather’s death certificate and found that it listed his father as James Mann Meacham Jr., from there we searched for James Mann’s obituary and death certificate. We found both and the obit listed all of his children and his 2 wives and the death certificate listed his father’s name and his mother’s 1st name and said he was buried in Hollywood Cemetery. I found nothing else for 2 years and what stumped me is I couldn’t find James Mann Meacham in the 1880 census in either Tenn. or KY On Jan. 1, 2003 I decided this is going to be the year that I break the Meacham brick wall. I had found a Meacham website and searched through it many times for just a tidbit of my family to no avail so I finally decided to contact the web host William Meacham. He promptly emailed me back telling me he had no information on them and asked if I was sure of my grandfather and great grandfather’s 1st and middle names. I sent him back copies of the obituaries and death certificate and thanked him for his help and asked him to keep me in mind if he ever found anything. Feb. 1, 2003 I had 2 emails that had me so happy that I cried. The 1st was from Rita Gierka Shapiro telling me that she had found her parents in the family tree I had online and that James Mann Meacham was her grandfather. It turned out that her mother was my grandfather’s sister. She has provided me with some pictures, information and a letter written by James Mann Meacham to her mother and then another letter written by Mary Westlake Naylor Meacham (his wife) to her mother. To make it even more thrilling I found out from her that there was still 1 living daughter Virginia Carleen “Ginny” Meacham Dowds. Unfortunately, “Ginny” passed away before I ever got to meet her but Rita did tell her about me and I wrote her a letter and sent her a couple pictures of my father. The 2nd email that day was from William Meacham, he had found James Mann Meacham in 1880. He stated that it bothered him that he couldn’t find any information on my line since the Meacham family of Tenn. were well documented so he started digging and found that the reason I had been unable to locate James Mann Meacham was because that wasn’t his given name it was James Mann Mitchum! Why the name change? You will find in this story several Mitchum’s that changed their name to Meacham and we may never know why but there is a story that was passed down to some of the members that I met along the way. It is said that after Lucille LaVerne Mitchum became a stage actress some of the family felt that it wasn’t an honorable profession so they changed their name to not be associated with her. I think this could be it but the other possibility is that like so many people of that time illiteracy was quite common so they didn’t know how to spell so it got spelled however someone spoke the name or heard it spoken. He also put me in contact with another researcher Willis Finley who had information back to my GGGG grandfather Robert Mitchum. The following is our story. The first 6 generations have not been proven by me or anyone known to me. Starting at Henry and Frances Banks the information is in a bunch of papers that Frances Holston has collected over the years along with information that I found on the LDS site. She believes that it is a good possibility that they are Robert Mitchum’s ancestors. What was found though was that the name was spelled several different ways even back then, this is what makes it so hard to find them. I have used just 2- Mitchum & Meacham so as to avoid too much confusion. I wasn’t sure that I wanted to put in those generations that weren’t proven but decided that it was better to list them than to not and find out latter that they were part of the family.
Some of the abbreviations that I used are- abt=about, btw=between, aft=after, bef=before and the * sign is used when the date is unknown to me. When you find that I wrote that someone’s living status is unknown, it is because at the time I wrote this I did not know if they were alive or not. When it says that I have no other information on someone that means that I don’t know if they are married or not. I have proof read the whole book 3x and hope that I have corrected all the errors but I still may have missed some errors. When I says that they are the son or daughter of Unknown it just means that at the time, I didn’t have their parent’s names.
Please remember this is your family history and feel free to make corrections or additions to your book. It is something that I hope you will be proud of and will hand down for generations to come.
The Scrapbook section is a collection on pictures that have either been sent to me or I have been able to get off of family websites. They order I put them in is by birth order of Robert Mitchum’s children and then by birth order of the descendants family. Every person is indexed except for the descendant chart, so if you are looking for yourself or someone else go to the back of the book and look for the name in the index and it will tell you all of the pages that person is listed on.