NOTE - This page will always be under
construction -
I will be adding more and more historical data as time goes on.
Genealogy without history is a list of names and dates - dull, uninteresting and
teaches you nothing. The only way to find out about a person is to find
out what events and opportunities he was influenced by, then look at how he
responded to them. There are a lot of people in our lives who might be
heroes in other circumstances but who are never placed in a situation where
those talents and tendencies might show themselves. So in order to know
anyone, you must know how and where they grew up and what went on around
them. I will go into the history of the South, how it was settled and how
the people moved around, but first I'd like to take a few moments to tell a bit
of my own history, what got me started in my own study of history and genealogy.
I was born and raised in what was then the small town of Marietta, which is in Cobb County, Georgia, but which is now basically a suburb of Atlanta on the north side. Now, many folks wouldn't think that was any different than anyone else raised in a small town that grew bigger over the years, but in many ways, it was very different. The biggest difference was because of where my home town was located, I grew up surrounded by history and practically immersed in the stories and lore surrounding those things that had happened in my own back yard. First of all, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park was only a couple of miles from my house - we drove by it every day, we went there for picnics all the time, and I can't count the times I've hiked all over the grounds of that battlefield, sat up on the cannons and looked out from the top over the surrounding countryside, looked out at Atlanta and wondered what those men who actually fired those guns were thinking as they looked out over the very ground I looked over.
Kennesaw Mountain right after the battle.
We lived in the path Sherman took towards Atlanta. Next door to my Granny's house was a marble marker that looked like a grave marker, which noted that a church had stood there until Sherman burned it down, including the "birth" and "death" dates of its existence. You may think that the Civil War happened so long before I was born that it didn't matter any more, I mean, it had been 100 years by the time I was a kid. But we saw the results of it still on a daily basis. If someone built a new home on undeveloped land, the first several years whenever they'd plow their garden spot, they'd find bits and pieces of Civil War stuff, from home-poured bullets to ammunition boxes to cannon balls, rusted bits of metal in shapes unfamiliar to anyone living's eyes. There were still burn marks on many of the block and brick buildings in the little towns that survived the War. At Granny's house, which was surrounded by several miles of untouched woods, you could actually see the lines in the forest where the old growth trees like huge old oaks, were gone for several hundred feet in the exact area where Sherman burned - it was that easily seen, and we grew up understanding what those trees meant. We played in the woods surrounding Granny's house, where you could still see the foxholes, and had mock battles hiding out in the same holes those men dug in the ground and fired from. If you dug down in the bottom of them, you found bullets, old knives and bits of metal, or even bones. We'd go hiking out in the woods and wading in cold streams and find arrowheads and other pieces of history. It surrounded us, it was part of us, it made us who we were, and it hooked me forever.
 A Confederate brass coat button
|
A Confederate States of America 50 cent note |
The spur off a Confederate Cavalryman's boot |
Because of this type of upbringing, we simply accepted ourselves and our families as being part of the history surrounding us. We just knew we were part of it and it was part of us. I believe our history lessons were a bit easier for us, too, because we had a more intimate view of what history was and how it worked - it wasn't just names and dates and statistics to us - we knew the spot where the battle took place where Great Uncle So-and-So died, we'd been to his grave, we'd seen the still-existing signs of the battle. We could stand on the battlefield and hold up the old photographs with the bodies laying all over and still see the same view - just the bodies were missing. We either were or knew families who had been monetarily comfortable before the War and had nothing but their manners and their pride afterwards, even 100 years later.
The square of downtown Marietta before the War.
After the War, right in downtown Marietta, we see this:
This is the Civil War cemetery, with the graves of many killed during the
Marietta and Kennesaw Mountain battles, including those from both sides.
The remains of old mill at Acworth, Georgia, the town where my Daddy grew up.
The Etowah River bridge, destroyed by Sherman's Army on the way to Atlanta.
Now, most of the families that had been in that part of Georgia for very long started off in Virginia, usually from England or Scotland or Ireland before that. They came by ship and either bought land or took up grants given to them by the King of England for military service, as a reward for a favor done, as an invitation to join in sharing the wealth of a newly-acquired land. Once they arrived, they worked hard to settle their land, establishing farms and businesses from nothing but brambles and woods and marshes. Older sons inherited and built on what their fathers started, younger sons moved out and started their own farms. They spread down into North Carolina, some further south into South Carolina then west, and some across the western mountains of North Carolina directly into Tennessee and Georgia.