Carolina in My Mind

      My great-grandparents Hulett Hall Widener Sr. and Rubye Mae Cochran took my grandfather Hulett Jr. on a trip to North Carolina in September 1936, when he was five years old. They may have been visiting friends or family, or they may have taken a vacation. These are some of the pictures from their Depression-era road-trip.

How Green Was Their Valley

      The first of my Widener ancestors to settle in Georgia came from Fairfield County, South Carolina, in the 1820s. My great-great-great-great-grandfather Henry Widener was born in 1791 or 1792 and married Nancy Kuglar in 1814. There were two daughters by the time the family migrated, probably along the Fall Line Road from Columbia to Augusta and across the Savannah River into Georgia. It was another 130 miles through piney woods to their destination, Henry County, where they established themselves as farmers near the Ocmulgee River’s headwaters.

      The lands they settled were former Creek Indian territory ceded to Georgia in the Treaty of Indian Springs on January 8, 1821.  In the resulting bonanza neither the Wideners nor Nancy’s younger brother James David Kuglar, who migrated with them, won lots. Perhaps they purchased land from the grantees or became tenant farmers. (James won a tract of land in Muscogee County in the 1827 lottery but it appears he remained in Henry and was married there a year later.) 

      Nancy gave birth to three sons beginning with my great-great-great-grandfather John D. Widener on June 22, 1830. Joseph M. and Andrew J. followed around 1832 and 1833. There was also a daughter, Mary Ann, born around 1835. From the 1850 census we learn the value of Henry’s real estate was $3,830 and that he was unable to read or write. It seems however that his wife was literate. The three sons married in Henry County in that decade; John was the first, wedding Nancy Amanda ‘Mandy’ Dickey on December 28, 1854. Nancy was the daughter of a quite elderly Irishman (he was 61 when she was born on October 26, 1835) named Thomas and a Virginian named Martha, 20 years his junior. They too moved to the county in the 1820s from South Carolina and were of modest means: in 1850 and 1860 Thomas valued his property at $200.

Blackjack Mountain: the green, green grass of home

      In the late 1850s the Widener and Kuglar clan lit out for the territory of Carroll County, what’s been called Georgia’s last frontier. They settled in the furthest reaches of its southwestern corner, nestled against the Alabama line, in Bowdon. The town is situated among the undulating ridges and expansive vistas of the Southern Appalachians. Blackjack Mountain, one of the highest points in Georgia south of Atlanta, stands just south of town and was the sight of trade routes and rituals before the Cherokee were expelled in the 1830s. Bowdon was founded in 1856 and would have counted the Wideners and Kuglars as pioneer citizens. The families homesteaded on neighboring lots in the fledgling hamlet, offspring were produced, the land was cultivated, and there was reason for optimism until the crisis of secession exploded into civil war and sent the Widener brothers to battles far away.

The church sits on a promontory overlooking the Little Tallapoosa River in the Victory community east of Bowdon. Some Wideners are reputedly ensepulchred in the churchyard, but on my visit I encountered neither their granite memorials nor ghostly whispers.

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'

The Young and the Old in Pictures

      Some of the artifacts I most enjoy discovering are photographs featuring four generations of family. These photographs depict a stark contrast between the extremes of age and youth, experience and innocence. The receding light of old age and the promise of new life mingle in the moment captured by the camera. The four seasons of life pictured below bring to mind A. E. Housman’s untitled poem about ageing (first and last stanzas):

When summer's end is nighing
And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
And all the feats I vowed
When I was young and proud.

So here's an end of roaming
On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
For summer's parting sighs,
And then the heart replies.

 

 This photograph shows my great-great grandfather Julius Ira Delamater (b. 1876) on the left and his mother Georgia Clifford Glover (b. 1853) on the right. In the middle is Julius's son John Ira holding his own son, either John (b. 1921) or Bill (b. 1922).

 This is one of the most remarkable photographs I've come across. On the left is Leonora Smith McKown (b. 1843), draped in a shawl and topped off with some peculiar headgear. Next to her is her daughter Edna Earle McKown Williams (b. 1876), mother of my great-grandfather Hugh, nicely turned-out in a three-piece suit on the right. My great-grandmother Elizabeth (Grandma Williams) is holding their firstborn and only son Hugh Jr., who died at just 20 months in 1925.

 Mattie Jane Potter Tate (b. 1864) is standing in front of the house in Barrow or Jackson Counties she may have lived in, surrounded by her son Alvin and his wife Sudie, their son Edgar and his wife Mary Jane, and my grandmother Bettye (Nana) in sunglasses and a swimsuit. This photograph was made around 1938.

My mother Beth stares quizzically into the camera in this snapshot from around 1961, as my grandfather Thomas Brayton (Pepaw) holds her on his lap. Behind them are (on right) my great-grandmother Grace America Tucker Brayton (Grandma Brayton) and (on left) her mother Emma Eugenia Bridges Tucker (b. 1874).

Grandma Brayton holds me in her lap in this photograph from spring 1986. She is flanked by Mom, Charles Reynolds Brayton (Grandpa Brayton), and Pepaw.

The family is gathered at First Baptist Church of College Park for my dedication in the spring of 1986. Mom and Dad are on left with Grandma Williams in the center. Behind her is uncle Keith and next to her are her daughters Aunt Betty and my grandmother Charlotte (Memaw).

Great-Grandparents

      It was quite fortuitous and most uncommon that as a child I knew five of my great-grandparents. Growing up around kinfolk more than 80 years older than me may partially account for my interest in genealogy and tales of yore. As a youngster I found it incomprehensible that one of my great-grandfathers, Charles Brayton, was born in 1899: an entirely different century! I don't want to sound mawkish or fusty, but I feel that by virtue of accumulating so many years the elderly are owed our respect and deference, though this occasionally requires Herculean patience given their ancient eccentricities. By way of introduction to my family I present my great-grandparents in photographs.

My mother's maternal grandparents, Hugh Whitfield Williams and Lala Elizabeth Delamater, at home in Red Oak, early 1960s

My father's maternal grandparents, Edgar Lee Tate and Mary Jane Russell, Jefferson, Ga., early 1940s

 

My father's paternal grandparents, Rubye Mae Cochran and Hulett Hall Widener Sr., Masonic lodge in East Point, late 1960s

 

My mother's paternal grandparents, Grace America Tucker and Charles Reynolds Brayton, at home in East Point, 1955

Origins

      Joan Didion writes in The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Nations tell themselves stories called origin myths, which explain the past and adumbrate the future. Individuals have their equivalents in the form of family histories, genealogies, old letters, tattered photographs, musty files, tawny newspaper clippings, and the miscellaneous heirlooms tucked away in the attic. “Book of Generations” endeavors to compile, chronicle, annotate, archive, and preserve a familial origin myth, a personal pre-history, a specific and intimate archaeology.

Only guard yourself and guard your soul carefully, lest you forget the things your eyes saw, and lest these things depart your heart all the days of your life, and you shall make them known to your children, and to your children's children.
—Deuteronomy 4:9

      It is our collective and inherited shame that we know so little of our forebears. We have neglected to remember in the active: to remember to remember. The inscription on many headstones reads, “Gone but not forgotten,” yet they have passed from memory into obscurity. This blog aims to reanimate their silenced voices, through the recollections of those still living and the mementos they left behind. The vast treasure of online information makes research into past generations easier than ever before, with millions of government documents now available digitally. These official records give shape and texture to our forebears when anecdotes and photographs are absent or insufficient.

      Genealogical inquiry synthesizes many of my longstanding fascinations: old family photographs, rural landscapes, Southern culture and history, the inimitable cadence and content of my elders’ storytelling. The narrator in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men reflects, “I always liked to hear about the old timers. Never missed a chance to do so.” As I undertake this quest it is too late to hear from many of the “old timers” who have passed on, to ask them the questions that my research has posed, to hear from their own mouths how they experienced loneliness and camaraderie, hardship and joy, weakness and power. This dearth of first-person perspective is lamentable, yet embarking on this journey in my 27th year rather than in a later season of life, as is most common with students of genealogy, enables me to listen to, learn from, and record the reminiscences of three grandparents and numerous grand-aunts and uncles. They will travel with me down the country roads of memory as we craft our own origins myth.