Family in High Places

      Some people do genealogy to establish regal ancestry or connect themselves to grandees from the past. I think this is a frivolous and futile pursuit, and not a very good reason for inquiring into one’s roots. The English theologian Bishop William Warburton (1698-1779) commented on the ambiguous meaning of such connections: “High birth is a thing which I never knew any one to disparage except those who had it not; and I never knew any one to make a boast of it who had anything else to be proud of.” I therefore regard the following discovery, upon which I stumbled while researching an entirely separate and mundane topic, as obliquely relevant yet quite amusing: the President of the United States and I are distant kinfolk.
      Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., is my eighth cousin twice-removed on my paternal grandmother’s side. His seventh-great-grandparents and my ninth-great-grandparents were John Browning (1728-1803) and Elizabeth Demarest (1725-1774). John was born in Virginia and moved to Wilkes County, Georgia, following the death of his wife, who hailed from Delaware and passed away in North Carolina. I descend from their daughter Phebe Browning (1762-1857), and the President comes from her older brother James Browning (1745-1812). This news will scandalize some and delight others in my family, but I am confident it will be received by the White House with universal acclaim. I look forward to celebrating Christmas with my long-lost relations.

A Mulberry River Runs Through It

      The area of the Mulberry River watershed settled by Maher Shalal Hashbaz Lyle and his family is still mostly rural, its bucolic appearance interrupted occasionally by gothic scenes of idle bulldozers at the gates of failed residential developments and rusted cars in the lots of kudzu-covered body shops, relics of when the region was, according to prosecutor Floyd G. Hoard, “the hub of the stolen automobile industry in rural Georgia.” State Route 53, carrying cars between Braselton and Winder, crosses the Mulberry River, now the boundary between Barrow and Jackson Counties, around the site of the early Lyle settlement. The terrain rises into piney woods above the river, wherefrom one’s northward gaze surveys the rolling timberline of the Appalachian foothills. By the time of Maher’s 1814 interment in the hilltop graveyard that bears his name his family had put down roots in Jackson County that would keep them there for generations.

 Jackson County in 1796

A person who lives in an isolated house
        As the Lyle patriarch drew his last breaths the country for whose independence he fought was imperiled again by its former imperial master. In the War of 1812 the British armed the natives to menace the frontier, endangering the settlers in Jackson County and other areas along America’s contested western border. Georgia’s authorities acted against the threat and ordered the construction of a fort on Hog Mountain near the headwaters of the Appalachee River in present-day northeastern Gwinnett County. The outpost was completed in 1813 and named Fort Daniel. A route which we now call Peachtree Road was cut through to Fort Peachtree, another hastily-built stockade 30 miles southwest on the Chattahoochee River. Fort Daniel stood about fifteen miles west of the Lyle home and was garrisoned by the 25^th Regiment of the Georgia militia, which counted among its number Maher’s sons John and William Crawford. In the event the Brits’ native adjutants did not strike Jackson County.

Jackson is phenomenally rich in bottom lands.  The county is a system of water courses.  The head waters of the Oconee string through the county in perfect network.  There are the Pond Fork, Allen Fork, Walnut Fork and Mulberry Forks of the Middle Oconee River.  Then the trail of creeks, Sandy, Big and Little Curry, Crooked Creek, Cabin Creek, Turkey, Candler, Pond and Hurricane Creeks form the North Oconee, and these two branches of the river drain the lands for 10 miles and join just below Athens.

—1886 Jackson County Edition of The Weekly Banner-Watchman, Athens, Georgia

      William was born on December 21, 1770, in Virginia and married Elizabeth Boring, born on October 29, 1784, in North Carolina, on March 25, 1803, in Jackson County. Proximity may explain their matrimony: Elizabeth’s parents, Isaac Boring, Sr. and Phebe Browning, lived east of the Lyles along the Mulberry River. William was a farmer whose strict piety forbade labor on the Sabbath. The 1850 census discloses the value of William’s real estate was $2,500; in 1860 it was $4,000, and his personal estate was assessed at $10,804. The 1860 agricultural census shows his farm produced fifteen bushels of sweet potatoes, 75 pounds of butter, 35 bushels of wheat, 250 bushels of Indian corn, and 8,000 bales of hay. In the autumn of that year William died, two months shy of his 90^th birthday; Elizabeth passed on September 17, 1863. The Battle of Chickamauga raged 150 miles to the northwest as her family was in mourning. William and Elizabeth had twelve children, born between 1804 and 1827. The firstborn was Dilmus Johnston, named for William’s brother Dilmus. This uncommon name comes from Catalonia, a region of eastern Spain, and means “a person who lives in an isolated house.” Dilmus Sr. inspired several successive generations of Lyles and associated families to use his name, yet it is surprising that William chose it because family lore recounts that they didn’t even get along. Dilmus Sr.’s métier as a purveyor of spirits may have had provoked his ire.

When the English arrive they build a house, when the Germans arrive they build a barn, and when the Scots-Irish come they build a distillery.

—Appalachian saying

      Dilmus Sr. lived along the Mulberry River where in addition to operating grist and saw mills he ran a whiskey distillery whose product was so admired by the locals they begged him not to leave for the War of 1812 and thus deprive them his home brew. When the war ended in 1815 and the British blockade was lifted, Dilmus Sr. ordered from Nova Scotia two pairs of flint millstones, which arrived at Charleston harbor and were transported overland to the Mulberry River with great difficulty. Dilmus Sr. used the millstones for the next 32 years until in a macabre instance of peripeteia one of the massive granitic discs fell onto his foot and crushed it. Naïve to lethal infection and far removed from any competent practitioner of medicine, his family took him home, where he succumbed to gangrene on November 1, 1847.

Mulberry train depot, ca. 1910

      Dilmus Sr.’s son Dilmus Reid was born on December 3, 1815 in Jackson County and operated the mill after his father’s demise. In early 1861 he served as one of three delegates representing the county of his birth at the secession convention in Milledgeville, where he voted in favor of Georgia’s departure from the Union. He had been the postmaster at Mulberry since April 4, 1838, and at the South’s defeat was dismissed from the position and denied a presidential pardon due to his service under the Confederate government. This prompted Dilmus Reid to appeal to President Andrew Johnson in a letter dated July 26, 1865, the text of which reads:

Sir: I held under the Government of the Confederate States the appointment of Post Master at Mulberry Jackson County Geo – a small country Post Office remote from any City – or Town. This office I held for the convenience of the surrounding community & certainly not for the honor or profit of the position. But the fact of having held it excludes me from the pardon & amnesty offered in you excellency’s Proclamation of May 29th 1865. I therefore, herewith humbly and respectfully submit to your Excellency my Special application for Pardon from the pains and penalties now imposed upon me by the Laws of the United States. I have taken and Subscribed the prescribed Amnesty Oath, which I shall observe and keep in good faith. My property is worth less than twenty thousand. Being above the Conscription age I have had no connexion with the Military Service in the Confederate Armies except a few months service in the State Militia under a Law of the State. It is my intention & purpose to be a loyal and useful citizen for the U.S. From that Government I expect protection and to that Government I give my Allegiance. I am Somewhat advanced in life with a large family mainly to raise and educate. With these responsibilities and duties resting upon me I cannot feel indifferent to the loss of what means I possess. The thought of living under the ban of the Government is deeply mortifying to me. I therefore appeal to your Excellency for the exercise of that clemency towards me, which has so signally characterized the official conduct of your Excellency towards so many others and invoke pardon from all the penalties to which I am now obnoxious. No proceedings have been instituted to confiscate my estate. All of which I have the honor most Respectfully to Submit As in duty bound &c &c

Dilmus Reid affirmed his support for the Constitution and the emancipation of the slaves in a loyalty oath signed in Athens on August, 14, 1865, witnessed by Major Matthias S. Euen, who filled in the blanks on the printed form: “The above named has florid complexion grey hair, and blue eyes; is 5 feet 9 inches high, aged 49 years; by profession a merchant.” The provisional governor of Georgia recommended a pardon, citing his position as “only a Country postmaster,” and passed on the application to the United States Attorney General. Mail to the Mulberry office was discontinued on September 28, 1866, but when it was reestablished in 1872 he was restored to his former position, which he held until his death in 1889.

 This remarkable photograph is on display at the Crawford W. Long Museum

in downtown Jefferson. It portrays three of William Crawford Lyle's

sons; one of them is believed to be Dilmus Johnston Lyle.

Miles of Lyles 
      William and Elizabeth’s oldest son Dilmus Johnston Lyle was born on January 4, 1804, in Jackson County. On February 21, 1828, he married Sarah Polly Green, born on February 15, 1801, in Spartanburg, South Carolina to John Green and Jane Bickerstaff. His wife, known to her family as Sally, gave birth to eight children between 1829 and 1842. Dilmus seems to have been a farmer of limited means. The 1860 census gives the value of his personal estate as $560, in 1870 as $100; in none of the censuses does he claim to own any land. Dilmus is listed in the 1880 census, conducted on June 10, as the head of household with Sally and two of their children. It is believed he died later that year as no further records can be found. Sally died on November 21, 1893. Her obituary reads:

      Sarah Jane Lyle was the second child born to Dilmus Johnston and Sally, on November 8, 1830. She can be found living with her parents in the Mulberry settlement in the censuses of 1840, 1850, and 1860. On December 9, 1860, she married William Henry Potter, a carpenter born in Rhode Island. Nothing is known of his parents or when he came to Georgia, except that he was previously married to Permelia Nixon on August 10, 1825, with whom he had eight children before her death in January 1860. According to the 1850 census he was born around 1795, yet the 1870 census lists his birth year as 1810. It is possible he lied about his age to Sarah Jane and her family, as he was about 35 years older than her and even older than her father. In the 1860s they had two daughters and two sons, the youngest of whom was trusted with the old family name Dilmus. In 1870 William listed the value of his land as $300 and his personal estate as $200. There is no further record of him, and the time and nature of his death and his place of burial are unknown.

 Sarah Jane at Doster Cemetery: “She died as she lived a Christian”

      Sarah Jane was just entering middle age when her husband died. According to subsequent censuses she was occupied as a farmer and was the head of household in which some of her children and grandchildren lived and worked as farm laborers. In 1910 Sarah Jane’s newborn great-grandson and my future great-grandfather Edgar Lee Tate lived with his family not far from her home west of Jefferson. They were farmers in an area known for corn, oats, hay, peas, and syrup, and the harvests were so plentiful and the climate so inviting that Jackson County’s population reached 30,000 that year—a sum not surpassed until 1990. The wild frontier Maher Shalal Hashbaz Lyle settled had changed in a century to a landscape of fields, pastures, mills, and railroads—a transformation witnessed and helped along by the Lyles and finally bookended by Sarah Jane Lyle Potter’s death on June 17, 1913, for which her grandson and my great-great-grandfather Alvin Crawford Tate penned this tribute:

The Jackson Herald, July 3, 1913

The Emerald Lyle

      The story of our branch of the Lyle family begins in Scotland in the 1600s and terminates a century ago in Jackson County, Georgia, with my grandmother Bettye Widener’s great-great-grandmother. This essay chronicles the first part, up to 1814. It is a multigenerational concatenation of people at the mercy of historical forces like migration, religious persecution, and the vagaries of pre-modern agriculture. The Lyles faced such an array of challenges that it brings to mind Eliphaz’s speech in the Book of Job: “Although affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” (5:6-7). The Lyles may not have pondered the provenance of their problems as these verses do, but they probably coped as best they could, such that a retrospective of their lives reads like a saga.

Don’t that road look rough and rocky?
      The etymology of “Lyle,” like numerous other surnames in the British Isles, can be traced to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. William the Conqueror ordered a census in 1085, compiled the next year as the Domesday Book. This document references a man of the name Hunfridus de Insula, “de Insula” being Latin for “of the island.” The French translation reads “de l’Isle,” and after Norman rule ended in England the “de” was dropped and its spelling gradually evolved into innumerable variations, one of which was “Lyle.” An early Scottish exponent of place begetting name was Ralph de l’Isle, who built Duchal Castle at the confluence of two rivers, dug a moat connecting them, and sealed off his residence as an island fortress. His name first appears in an 1170 grant to monks in nearby Paisley as the Latinized “Radulphus de Insula, Dominus de Duchal.” The castle fell in the 1500s, by which time “Lyle” was a common name in the area.
      The authoritative text on Lyle genealogy, Oscar K. Lyle’s 1912 study Lyle family: the ancestry and posterity of Matthew John, Daniel and Samuel Lyle, pioneer settlers in Virginia, locates our Lyle ancestors in western Scotland on the Kintyre Peninsula, a narrow landmass 30 miles long that stretches southward into the North Channel towards Ireland. In 1606, the Lyles left Kintyre to settle in Ulster, the northern province of Ireland. The reasons for this migration reach back several decades and reinforce the British historian G. M. Trevelyan’s dictum that the interaction between Scotland and Ireland is “a constant factor in history.”
      For most of the Sixteenth Century the English fought to establish hegemony over Ireland. As they encroached into Ulster in the 1590s they ignited the resistance of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone. In the Nine Years’ War (1594-1603), O’Neill and his Irish allies battled to halt the invasion of their territory and were defeated by a large English army. Both sides employed such devastating scorched-earth tactics that Ulster was left a howling wilderness, depopulated and famished. A treaty was signed on March 30, 1603, six days after the death of Queen Elizabeth. She was succeeded by King James, a Scot, whose ascension unified the crowns of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Hugh Montgomery, a Scottish aristocrat and friend of the new sovereign, saw an opportunity to consolidate the English position in Ulster by resettling tenants from the crowded Scottish Lowlands. Along with James Hamilton, secret agent to the crown, and Conn O’Neill, an Irish landowner who had to be broken out of jail and granted a royal pardon, Montgomery submitted the scheme to King James. He accepted the deal in April 1606 and divided between the three men vast holdings in Counties Down and Antrim, on the eastern shores of Ulster. Thanks to Montgomery and Hamilton’s robust recruitment, the first wave of settlers reached Ulster the next month.

The Scots are a middle temper, between the English tender breeding and the Irish rude breeding and are a great deal more likely to adventure to plant Ulster than the English.
—King James I

      As this sweeping policy was enacted the government punished another rebellion by the earls in western Scotland by expropriating and evacuating their lands. Oscar K. Lyle’s book asserts the Lyles were made refugees by this punitive action and resettled in Ulster on Randall MacDonnell’s land. MacDonnell, the son-in-law of the Earl of Tyrone and a Catholic, joined his fellow Irishmen in the Nine Years War but halfway through switched sides, for which treachery he was rewarded 333,907 acres. The Scottish refugees to Ulster crossed the Northern Channel from Kintyre to County Antrim, points just thirty miles apart and within sight on a clear day. It was a short journey as migration routes go, but its effects would resound into the New World.

 The Glens of Antrim

Don’t that sea look wide and deep?
      The Scottish tenants set about cultivating the land, which even in 1575, decades before the most recent spasm of rebellion and conquest, Sir Sydney Smith described as “all desolate and waste.” Fortuitously for this risky enterprise, there was a bumper crop in 1606 and another the next year, at which time occurred the Flight of the Earls. For reasons still subject to historical debate, many Irish nobles who were vanquished in the Nine Years War and yet were treated leniently nonetheless feared English persecution and fled to Spain. The section of MacDonnell’s colossal bounty on which the Lyles settled was southeast of the Glens of Antrim, a region of uneven agriculture and breathtaking natural beauty. In the parish of Larne in the town of Browndodd the Lyles lived and farmed and worshipped as Presbyterians and around midcentury Samuel Lyle was born to parents of unknown appellation or avocation.
      Samuel became a landholder in Browndodd and in 1680 married Janet Knox of Knoxtown, daughter of John Knox and Sally Locke. Oscar K. Lyle describes their idyllic home in his 1912 book:

A lane leads to the house, which is still standing and occupied by one of his descendants. It is of stone, two stories of height and has now a slate roof. In earlier days the roof was thatched, as was the method of the Scotch…. In it is the cradle in which were rocked three of the four Lyle pioneers to Virginia and the father of the fourth one. This cradle was in service for seven generations.

This cradle was built by James Lyle, one of Samuel and Janet’s six children. In 1700 he married Margaret Snoddy, also of Scots-Irish extraction, possibly at Raloo Presbyterian Church, where it is believed the family worshipped and are buried. Three of their sons would immigrate to America, but the oldest, Robert, remained in Ireland. He married Ann Jane Locke and according to Oscar K. Lyle’s book worked as a “linen lapper at Larne bleach-green, one who takes charge of the linen and sees it packed up.” They lived on his wife’s farm in Toreagh and later on her father’s farm called “Pullendoes” and, when John Wesley toured Ireland, he preached an open-air service at their home—much like the preaching he and his brother Charles had done under the moss-draped live oaks on St. Simons Island years before.

…the young men of Ireland who wish to be free and happy should leave it and come here as quick as possible. There is no place in the world where a man meets so rich a reward for good conduct and industry as in America.
—John Dunlap, in a letter home to his brother-in-law

      Drought, poor crop yields, rising rents, and the Penal Laws of 1704, which targeted Catholics but also disadvantaged Presbyterians, triggered massive Scots-Irish immigration to America. Between 1717 and 1776 as many as 200,000 Scots-Irish crossed the ocean, lured by letters from family and reports in newspapers, both of which insinuated cheap land and limitless possibilities. Against this tumultuous backdrop David Locke Lyle, son of Robert and Ann, married Mary Blair in Larne on December 27, 1735. Over the next decade his brother Samuel and their uncles Matthew, John, and Daniel immigrated to Virginia and settled on Timber Ridge near the Shenandoah Valley. David and Ann arranged passage to South Carolina with their two young children and set sail in 1746. Some researchers have conjectured they were passengers aboard the Good Hope that sailed from Dublin to Charleston, but the vessel's name would be the cruelest of ironies: when the ship dropped anchor in Charleston harbor Mary was the widowed mother of two fatherless children, the hapless head of household having died at sea.

The Lyle House in Browndodd, ca. 1912

A New Life in America
      Tragedy did not end with the loss of David Lyle. Soon after their arrival one of the two children, a daughter, died, leaving Mary to look after her only remaining son Robert, named for his grandfather. Robert was born on March 14 of 1736 or 1737 in County Antrim—a quarter of a millennium before my own birthday. Mary and Robert appear to have joined their kindred in the Virginia backcountry following these tragic losses. For reasons about which researchers have only speculated (such as a religious epiphany), Robert changed his name before his 21st birthday to the longest name in the Bible: Maher Shalal Hashbaz Lyle. He drew this moniker from the Book of Isaiah:

Moreover the Lord said unto me, Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen concerning Mahershalalhashbaz. And I took unto me faithful witnesses to record, Uriah the priest, and Zechariah the son of Jeberechiah. And I went unto the prophetess; and she conceived, and bare a son. Then said the Lord to me, Call his name Mahershalalhashbaz. (8:1-3)

Perhaps the Lyle formerly known as Robert saw in this prophetic name an homage to the country he left behind, as “Maher” is an Irish surname meaning “kindly” or “generous.” Perhaps he understood the Hebrew translation of the name, “The spoil speedeth, the prey hasteth,” and identified with its immediacy. Or perhaps this was an instance of reinvention and self-fashioning of the sort that has given America a reputation as the place to start over as a self-made man. We will never know the motivation for this change, only the life he lived under its banner.
      Maher’s name is found on a record in Bedford County, Virginia, in 1756 and as witness to a deed in Halifax County in 1763, the same year he married Elizabeth Gibson (she was called Betty), born on February 15, 1741, in Virginia to parents of Scots-Irish origin. Within a few years Maher purchased 166 acres on Cheese Creek in what became Campbell County, south of present-day Lynchburg. Between 1764 and 1784 they had twelve children, the last several born during the Revolutionary War. The Scots-Irish had a pivotal role in securing America’s independence from British rule, which had oppressed them in their former country and now in their new home. The Sons of the American Revolution have recognized Maher a Patriot for selling on credit 275 head of cattle to the army and for serving under George Washington in the Virginia Lines of the Continental Army when Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. The stock from whence Maher came had settled the wilds of the Virginia frontier before the war and persevered through the following crucible such that Washington remarked, “If defeated everywhere else, I will make my last stand for liberty among the Scots-Irish of my native Virginia.”
      In September 1782 Maher was compensated for supplying the American army, and on November 6, 1783 he and Betty sold their land to John Ward Sr. for £150. Per the indenture the Lyles lived there another year, after which they moved to upstate South Carolina. Betty’s family lived on an adjacent lot. Researchers have drawn attention to an apparent fracas between the families: on June 2, 1794, Maher and one of his sons brought suit against three of the Gibsons for breach of the peace. The matter was resolved in court when the defendants agreed to “a promise of good behavior toward the Lyles by the Gibsons for a period of twelve months and one day.” In 1799 Maher served on a jury in Union District and the 1800 census records him as the head of household. An unlikely bonanza drew them to Georgia before the ink had dried on the census form.

      According to a story supposedly carried in an Atlanta newspaper in the 1930s, Maher’s son Dilmus traveled to Jackson County, Georgia to survey land and water suitable for building a mill. When he returned he announced to the family he had instead found gold. His spellbinding tale and the lure of precious metal convinced the family to make haste to the site of the incipient goldmine, but Dilmus failed to locate the jackpot he had left just months before, dashing their hopes of easy riches. He reverted to his original plan and built the first grain mill in the area. Maher and Betty and many of their children settled along the Mulberry River, a tributary of the Middle Oconee River known to the Cherokee as Kuwa yi and the Creek as Tishmaqgu that rises near Braselton and weaves southeastwards between Hoschton and Winder. Maher and Betty lived with their son William and in the tax digest of 1809 owned a single slave.
      Maher Shalal Hashbaz Lyle died on January 30, 1814, in Jackson County; Betty followed on January 15, 1831. They are buried in Lyle Cemetery in a section shaded and overgrown by the woods, kith and kin nearby in eternal sleep. Two years ago Maher’s descendants conducted a 21-gun salute in his honor. A community called Mulberry grew where the Lyles first settled and in 1884 became a stop on the Gainesville, Jefferson, and Southern Railroad, later part of the Gainesville Midland Railroad. Though frontiers of geography and technology shifted and progressed and left Mulberry and the Lyle homestead behind, the inimitable Scots-Irish spirit endured. It was this spirit that animated the Lyles as they crossed the seas and settled the frontiers and shaped America into an empire of liberty unfolding across a whole continent.

Troubles and trials often betray those
Causing the weary body to stray
But we shall walk beside the still waters
With the Good Shepherd leading The Way.

Going up home to live in green pastures,
Where we shall live and die never more.
Even The Lord will be in that number,
When we shall reach that heavenly shore.

—H. W. Vanhoose, “Green Pastures”

Some Thoughts on Genealogy

      Having spent several months delving into my familial origins many questions have been answered. Most of my ancestors hail from the British Isles. My great-great-grandparents Widener lived around the corner from my high school alma mater in the 1920s. A staggeringly large number of past generations lived and are buried within 30 miles of where I grew up. I learned that great-great-grandmother Tucker adjusted the soil composition with rusty metal fencing to change the colors of the hydrangea mopheads, and great-great-grandmother Tate stewed tomatoes in a huge vat in the backyard before canning them. Some kinfolk were upholders of the law, others frequently violated it.
      Yet many questions remain. Why did my great-great-great-grandfather Delamater, a physician and planter from New York, die at age 42 in Walton County, Georgia, leaving a wife, young son, and vast estate? Why did my great-great-great-grandparents Russell emigrate from England to Colorado in the 1870s? Why did their son George William Russell leave Colorado and come to Atlanta, and how did he meet his wife Lucile Lee Rogers, a girl from Montgomery, Alabama? How did my great-great-great-grandmother Sudie Bilbo, née Luckie, widowed at a young age with two children, have two more babies with no trace of a father? And is the rumor true that she is buried in an unmarked grave outside the churchyard? Some of these questions may be answered, but others will remain forever a mystery.

Always remember there was nothing worth sharing
Like the love that let us share our name.
—The Avett Brothers, “Murder in the City”

      Assembling one’s genealogy begins with names. They are the structure around and within which further information is situated, contextualized, compared, and verified. The surname identifies a family and links past and present, while the given name identifies an individual link in the chain. These names often disclose surprising revelations. For example, after I told Memaw (Charlotte Ann Brayton, née Williams) that her great-great-grandmother was Charlotte Ann Peers, née Pomfrey (1818-1881), the pieces fell into place, and she said knowingly, “So that’s why Mother always wanted to call me Charlotte Pomfrey, but [sisters] Betty and Jean convinced her not to.” Memaw’s sisters’ names also honor their ancestors: Betty Frances for their aunt Cora Frances Delamater and Jean Wycliff for their great-great-great-grandparents the Wickliffes.
      I discovered a remarkable uniformity of names in my paternal grandmother’s family. Each of Nana’s (Bettye Jane Widener, née Tate) four great-grandmothers was named some form of Jane: Mattie Jane Potter, Willantha Jane Rogers, Mary Jane Mayhew, and Rosella Jane Doster. Nana’s mother was Mary Jane Russell, and Nana continued the tradition with her daughter Debrajane. Then there are names that, rather than following tradition, seem to be newly invented. The strangest names tend to be the women’s, and the strangest of all include Cresserious Elizabeth Hancock (1822-90), who married my great-great-great-great-granduncle Robert Jackson McKown; Thermutis Mote (c. 1926-?), my first cousin twice-removed; and Caldawood “Woody” Tate (1890-?), my great-great-grandaunt. I find no obvious explanation or origin of “Cresserious” and “Caldawood,” but “Thermutis” was the name of Pharaoh’s daughter who found baby Moses afloat in the Nile.

The Shores of Amerikay

      In the countryside southwest of Washington, Georgia, at the end of a rugged gravel road garlanded with yellow wildflowers and spangled with sunbathing butterflies, War Hill rises above Kettle Creek. In this woodland on Valentine’s Day 1779, 400 Patriot militiamen commanded by John Dooly, Andrew Pickens, and Elijah Clarke surprised and defeated a Loyalist force nearly twice their number in the Battle of Kettle Creek. These frontiersmen confirmed the moniker bitterly applied to the area by the British: “hornet’s nest.” Today on the hilltop an obelisk hails the great victory with words etched in stone. In a graveyard across the clearing white marble tombstones memorialize some of the veterans of the fight. This is the final resting place of my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Jacob McClendon and his son-in-law, my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather William Heard.

 

Sketch of the Battle of Kettle Creek. The original inscription reads,

"Engagement between the Whigs and Tories."

The McClendons
      The unlikely chain of events that would see these two men on the same colonial battlefield began with an oceanic voyage from Europe to the New World. According to the McClendon DNA Project, families with this surname originate in Northern Ireland. This area was called Ulster until 1921, when it was annexed by Great Britain and the rest of the island became independent Ireland. Ulster comprised approximately the same land area as metropolitan Atlanta and was divided into counties. Two of these, County Armagh and southeast County Down, are the earliest geographic origins of the McClendon name, a variant of “McAlinden,” which is the English translation of the Irish Gaelic “Mac Giolla Fhionnain.”
      The McClendons first set foot on American soil in present-day northeastern North Carolina. The area was colonized by Virginians moving south in the 1650s. Its reputation developed such that many in the Old Dominion called it Rogues Harbor because it was a haven for debtors and sundry miscreants, yet Quaker missionaries also traversed the region in its early days. The Carolina colony was founded in 1629 and stretched from Virginia to Spanish Florida. A division was made in 1712 between north and south, with the north becoming a royal colony in 1729 after the former proprietors were bought out by the crown. Native American resistance was overcome in several wars as migrant Europeans, many of Scots-Irish, German, and Huguenot derivation, poured into the colony.

Into my heart on air that kills

  From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

  What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

  And cannot come again.

—A. E. Housman

      The farthest into history for which the Y-DNA evidence has accounted is Dennis McClendon, born in 1641 in parts unknown (presumably Ulster or Scotland). He and his family settled in this region along the Albemarle Sound and Roanoke River in the 1690s. Part of a deed in Chowan Precinct reads, “Elizabeth Lewerton to Dennis Mackclenden this 3 April 1699 in ye 11th. year of ye Reign of our Sovereign Lord King William of England…” Dennis’ wife Elizabeth, born around 1660, predeceased him, and he remarried. The court of Perquimans Precinct was held at his home in 1704 and 1705 and at the home of his widow Deborah Whedbee McClendon on July 11, 1706, meaning he had expired within the preceding year.
      One of Dennis’ sons was Thomas McClendon, born in 1690, possibly in Barbados, a nexus of Atlantic travel and trade. He married Elizabeth Bush in 1716 in Chowan Precinct, the selfsame division where she was born on June 1, 1691. In 1717 there is a record of a “Thos. Macklindon” purchasing land from James Wilson in Chowan Precinct. In 1725 he served as executor of his brother’s will in Bertie Precinct. In 1729 Elizabeth died; Thomas married Mary Bryan the following year. Tax records indicate they moved to the southern end of the Pamlico Sound in Craven County in 1741 and 1742. He died in 1757 in Cumberland County, contemporary site of the city of Fayetteville.

       One of Thomas and Elizabeth’s sons was Jacob McClendon, born near the Albemarle Sound in northeastern North Carolina. His tombstone gives his birth year as 1715, the Sons of the American Revolution records put it at 1725 or 1726, still other sources as disparate as 1702, 1730, and 1731. Jacob married Martha Travis, born around 1736 in North Carolina, between 1748 and 1751, and they had eleven children. The births and baptisms of Isaac and Jamima were recorded in 1753 in the register book of Prince Frederick Parish, Winyah, an Anglican church. The next year the French and Indian War began, bringing intermittent battles between the colonists and France’s Native American allies to the frontier. During the war the family probably lived in Cumberland County, about halfway between the coast and the frontier. As the conflict wound down, Jacob was commissioned on March 11, 1761, as a lieutenant in the North Carolina militia in Dobbs County, but a reproduction of the list indicates his name was removed and does not give a reason. In 1774 Jacob set out for the Georgia frontier, where his daughter Nancy, born around 1760, would marry into the Heard family.

The Heards
      When personal taxation was imposed in Medieval England surnames became necessary. Various spellings of “Heard” were used by families engaged in herding animals. Some researchers have connected the Heard name to William the Conqueror, but there is no established link to our Heards. We can definitively trace them to Ulster, present-day Northern Ireland, where they were English settlers who spoke the local language. One legend about the Heards claims the paterfamilias was the Earl of Tyrone who, in an argument over tithes, threw a pitchfork at someone and was forced to make haste to America. However, no evidence for this story has been produced.

I’m bidding farewell to the land of my youth

and the home I love so well.

And the mountains so grand round my own native land,

I’m bidding them all farewell.

With an aching heart I’ll bid them adieu

for tomorrow I’ll sail far away,

O’er the raging foam for to seek a home

on the shores of Amerikay.

And when I am bidding my last farewell

the tears like rain will blind,

To think of my friends in my own native land,

and the home I’m leaving behind.

But if I’m to die in a foreign land

and be buried so far far away

No fond mother’s tears will be shed o’er my grave

on the shores of Amerikay.

—Irish folk song

      What we do know is there was a Heard man whose first name is lost, born around 1665 in County Tyrone. His sons inscribed the family in the pages of American history when they crossed the Atlantic in 1719-20. One of the sons was Charles, born around 1691 and married in 1718. They settled in Sansbury in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. On August 30, 1744, Charles received a land grant of 225 acres on the South Hardware River, a tributary of the James, in newly-formed Albemarle County, where in the previous year Thomas Jefferson was born. In a 1746 note to creditor Henry Cary we learn that Charles was a blacksmith and able to sign his own name legibly. By July 1748 he was dead, and the will in which he bequeathed his acreage to one of his sons, Charles Jr., was challenged in court by said Cary. Charles Jr. craftily maneuvered to sell the land to his brother, prompting a lawsuit for non-payment of his father’s debts. The court ordered the seizure of his property, in this case an iron knife and ring, which by the time they were sold by the sheriff in 1749 Charles Jr. and his family had evacuated the state and fled to Carolina.
      Charles Jr. was born around 1718 in County Tyrone and married Isabella in the early 1740s in Pennsylvania. They had six boys and one girl from 1743 to 1764. After their abrupt relocation to North Carolina they lived on 100 acres in Cumberland County. Through the 1750s and 60s Charles Jr. bought and sold hundreds of acres and served on several juries. In April 1768 he again fell into debt, and his property was seized. This latest entanglement saw him decamp to South Carolina, wherefrom in October 1768 he deeded 100 acres to one of his sons in exchange for fifteen pounds. The militia roll call in his former home county pointedly described the fiasco when in November 1770 it declared him to be “gone.” Charles Jr.’s dubious sojourn in the Palmetto State ended when he moved to Georgia. His departure for the thirteenth colony coincided with that of the McClendons. Both families lived in Cumberland County at the same time, and they became neighbors again in the frontier forests on the western bank of the Savannah River.

 

Wilkes County
      The land settled by the McClendons and Heards and thousands of other adventurous pioneers was originally Cherokee and Creek territory. A 1763 treaty between the Southern colonies and the natives limited settlement to south of the Little River. Subsequent commerce between traders and natives left the latter owing about £60,000. Sir James Wright, the royal governor, seized the opportunity and convened a congress on June 1, 1773, at which the Creek and Cherokee ceded two million acres in a wide swath along the western banks of the Savannah River extending northward to the confluence of the Keowee and Tugaloo Rivers. The land, known as St. Paul’s Parish until it was divided into counties, was opened for settlement in parcels from one to 100 acres. Farmers of good character were exhorted to tame the wilds and were assured the soil was suitable for indigo, Indian corn, cotton, tobacco, flax, and hemp. On December 7, 1773, at Wrightsborough, a Quaker community near Augusta, Charles Heard Jr. received his tract: “Herd, Charles--S. C. a wife 2 sons and 1 dau. from 17 to 9 years old. 200 acres on head of Fishing creek at Isaac Goldsbee's cabbin.” Jacob McClendon was granted land on October 10, 1774, at Dartmouth, later known as Petersburg, in the fork of the Broad and Savannah Rivers: “McClendon, Jacob--N. C. a wife 4 sons and 4 daus. from 18 to 1 years old. xxx acres on Fishing creek including xxx acres surveyed for Thomas Richardson including improvements made by Richardson and Nemh. Killcres.”

Stephen Heard and his horse Silverheels, from the 1913 collection

"Grandmother Stories from the Land of Used-to-Be" by Howard Meriwether Lovett

      Charles Jr.’s first cousin Stephen Heard, born in 1740 and a veteran of the French and Indian War, also settled in the ceded lands along with his father and brothers. The family came from Virginia where their land abutted the property of George Washington, from whom they purchased Arabian horses. On New Year’s Day 1774 the family and other settlers began constructing a stockade on the future site of Washington called Fort Heard or Heard’s Fort. Stephen homesteaded north of there on Fishing Creek. Jacob McClendon and Charles Jr. also settled the area, which today is ten miles north of Washington near the ghost town of Danburg. On February 5, 1777, a convention at Savannah officially named the land Wilkes County in honor of the British parliamentarian and proponent of the American cause John Wilkes.

Soon after the conference a party of surveyors, chain carriers, markers, artisans, guards, and astronomers, as well as a few adventurers and Indian braves, set out from Augusta. Crossing Little River, the company entered a country of magnificent forests abounding in deer, black bear, wolf, wildcat, and such small game as squirrel and rabbit. Quail rose whirring from the underbrush, and the clear, rapid streams were full of fish.

—Writers of the Works Progress Administration, The Story of Washington-Wilkes, 1941

This territory, called the New Purchase, contains about two millions of acres, lying upon the head of Great Ogechee, between the banks of the Savanna and Alatamaha, touching on the Ocone and taking within its precincts all the waters of Broad and Little rivers, comprehends a body of excellent fertile land, well watered by innumerable rivers, creeks and brooks.

—William Bartram, Travels, spring 1776

      The frontier in those days was hardly peaceful. Besides the outbreak of war there were Cherokee and Creek raids, one of which in 1777 resulted in Charles Jr.’s house being burned down, his property and belongings ransacked, and a slave woman stolen. In 1802 his sons were still seeking restitution in court. In January 1779 Augusta fell to the British, and the maneuvers which culminated in the Battle of Kettle Creek began. After the Patriot victory there Wilkes County was delivered from further British and Loyalist incursions. The county’s attitude towards the revolution was made clear when the first court met at Jacob McClendon’s house on August 25, 1779. Nine Loyalists were sentenced “to be hanged by the Neck till their bodies are Dead.” The following year Heard’s Fort was called Washington, the first city named for the revolutionary hero. On February 5, 1780, it was declared Georgia’s seat of government, and on February 18 Stephen Heard was elected acting governor for a one-year term.
      One of Charles Jr.’s sons William, born around 1751 in North Carolina, had also won a land grant of 100 acres and settled at Fishing Creek. He accumulated and sold hundreds of acres during and after the war, and around 1779 he married Jacob McClendon’s daughter Nancy. Charles Jr. lost his wife in this period and remarried a landowning widow, Margaret Brady. In Wilkes County’s first tax digest in 1785 it records he owned 615 acres there and another 200 in Greene County. Charles Jr. died in late 1797, and to his wife he left:

…my riding horse, Britton, also two cows, white, black and white face, together with the increses that they have had and to come. Also my household furniture, my feather bed excepted and bed quilt, also I give to my said wife the tract of land I now live on, all at her disposal, also I lend to my said wife my negro woman, named Rody, also my negro man, named Mingo, during her widowhood, providing that said negros are not moved out of this state.

In 1793 Jacob died and in his will divided his estate of more than a thousand acres and many slaves among his sons; to his daughter Nancy he bequeathed £25 payable in tobacco. His wife Martha lived for many more years in Wilkes County and died there in 1827. Nancy’s death followed on her father’s in the late 1790s, and William remarried Rachel Griffin, with whom he had several children. They moved to Harricane Creek in Jackson County in 1814. William died there in 1825.
      One of William’s daughters with his first wife was named Nancy, born on July 29, 1785. She had a brief marriage to Azariah Bostwick before he died as a young man, and she lived most of her nine decades as a widow. She died on July 2, 1876 and is buried at Macedonia Baptist Church in Oxford. Nancy Heard Bostwick was the great-great-grandmother of my great-grandmother Grace Tucker Brayton, yet there is no indication she or anyone else in our immediate family knew of this branch of their family tree. In 1790 Wilkes County contained one-third of Georgia’s population and counted as residents Meriwether Lewis and Eli Whitney, but today the area is depopulated and remembered mostly for its rich history. Now that we know about our Heard and McClendon ancestors we can remember our own connection to this rich history.