From Virginia to Georgia

      My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Frederick Rainey was born around 1779 in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, to Frederick Rainey and Molly Morgan. They were wed in the same county on May 10, 1775. Frederick Sr. died on October 10, 1803 and in a will dated December 14, 1802 bequeathed to his namesake furniture, a tract of land to be divided among the four sons, and a slave boy named Jack, who was to be freed from servitude on his 25th birthday, January 1, 1816. On September 8, 1806 the county deed book records that Frederick Jr. sold a 110 ¼-acre tract to his brother Smith for $120. Mecklenburg was a spigot of migration in those days, and, having turned land to gold, he looked for prospects southwards.

      The circumstances that led young Frederick to marry Catherine Cabiness (likely also of Mecklenburg) on November 14, 1813 in Putnam County, Georgia, are unclear. Putnam was carved out from Baldwin in 1807 and settled by winners of the 1805 and 1807 land lotteries. A number of Raineys, including Frederick’s uncle Isham, were ‘fortunate drawers’ and were granted lots of 202 ½ acres. These former Creek lands west of the Oconee River were quickly populated and by 1820 Putnam counted 15,000 residents. It seems Frederick joined his kin on the frontier and became a prosperous planter.

When I was a girl how the hills of Oconee
made a seam to hem me in
There at the fair when our eyes caught, careless

got my heart right pierced by a pin

— The Decemberists, 'Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)'

      Frederick owned four slaves in 1820, five in 1830, and seventeen in 1840. In 1850 he claimed a real estate value of $7,150. A federal agricultural survey taken in September of the same year lists his land holdings as 700 improved and 200 unimproved acres. The cash value of the farm was reported as $6,600. There were 3,500 bushels of Indian corn, 200 of oats, and 100 of wheat. There were 30 sheep, 100 swine, and nine horses. It was in this antebellum plenitude that Frederick and Catherine raised at least six children, including my great-great-great-great-grandmother.

       Virginia Philip Rainey was born on August 18, 1818, the second oldest child. Her name is a tribute to the land of her parents’ extraction and to her father’s younger brother Philip. Virginia married John J. Glover in Putnam on May 6, 1841. This was not John's first matrimonial endeavor, however. On December 11, 1834 in neighboring Jasper County he wed Christiana Goods, herself a widow. The 1840 census shows him housed with her and their two children, Elizabeth and Henry Harrison. The first Mrs. Glover must have perished because there is no further record of her. In 1850 John and Virginia still resided in Putnam but were soon to relocate to Houston County, where John, a farmer, listed the value of his assets at $1,075 in 1860.

      Virginia's father died in 1855, and her mother followed him five years later. Soon thereafter there was a rupture between Virginia and John, perhaps caused or aggravated by the death of their son in the Civil War. The 1870 census discloses that they were separated. Virginia returned to Putnam and was living in Eatonton. John stayed in Houston and was joined in his household by a woman, Aurilla Glover. It appears they continued to live apart, and in May 1880 John died. In the census conducted the next month Virginia replied that her ‘civil condition’ was ‘widow,’ which complicates the thesis that they were divorced. (Either they divorced, were separated and John did not marry Aurilla, or he committed bigamy.) Virginia died in Putnam or Jasper Counties on June 6, 1891 and is buried in Shady Dale’s only graveyard at Providence Baptist Church. Among the issue of their failed marriage was the youngest of four children, my great-great-great-grandmother Georgia Clifford Glover.

 'We trust in God to meet thee again'