Although my Southern ancestors on my mother’s side settled in the British colonies sometime before the Revolution, the question of when they arrived and where they first settled is challenging and, in some cases, controversial. Nevertheless, I have found one branch, the Morgan family, that is well documented. In contrast, other branches lack sources for events before the American Revolution. I recently viewed the primary … Continue reading The Carolina Connection

Following up on a previous post I wrote about Marietta Georgia and my third great-grandfather David Dobbs, I discovered that on at least one and possibly two occasions, David, a Colonel in the Georgia militia, had a prior association with General Sherman. Searching the newspaper archives for “Marietta” in November 1864, I wanted to see what the contemporary reports were about the town at the … Continue reading Marietta, 1844

On July 4, 1864, the town of Marietta, Cobb County, Georgia fell to union forces under the command of Gen. Sherman. My great-grandfather, James M Dobbs, Sr. turned five years old on that day. He and his family lived on a plantation outside of Marietta. His grandfather Col. David Dobbs lived in the town in a large fancy house with three orphaned grandchildren, and a … Continue reading Marietta, 1864

I realized the other day that my subscription to the New York Times gives me access to 150 years of archives of that newspaper. At first, I wanted to see the NYT’s take on events such as the Bloody Monday riot in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1855, the fall of Atlanta in 1864, and the destruction of Aspinwall, Panama in 1885. Then I recalled that my … Continue reading Chile Won’t Drink Our Beer

Aspinwall, Panama was a wild-west town deserving of the same notoriety as Dodge, Kansas; Tombstone, Arizona; and Deadwood in the Dakotas. According to David McCullough in his masterpiece on the building of the canal, “The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal (1870-1914), “the three most thriving industries [in Aspinwall] were gambling houses, brothels, and coffin manufacturing.” Years ago, I found my … Continue reading Panama Man

Sunday, July 3rd, will mark the 158th anniversary of the fall of Marietta, Georgia, to Union Forces under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman. The importance of Marietta and nearby Kennesaw Mountain was that they were the key to control of the Chattahoochee River and to the vital railway leading into Atlanta from the Shenandoah Valley. Thus allowing the union forces to lay siege … Continue reading What Miss Mattie Said to the General

As I mentioned in an earlier post from about six months ago, I have been working on a complete rewrite of Gathering Leaves (and not just another edition.) My goal is to eliminate repetition, remove superfluous minutia, and strip out all the endnotes (I admit I was in competition with Edward Gibbon for most endnotes ever.) In addition to there being deletions, there are also … Continue reading On Down the Tallapoosa to the Gulf of Mexico

Here is something interesting that I found regarding a third great-grandfather on my mother’s side. His name was Evan Prothro (1788-1864), a.k.a. Evan the Planter, grandson of Evan the Patriot, and father of my great-great-grandmother, Martha Josephine Prothro. He was a plantation owner and slaveholder who lived in the upcountry in South Carolina near Aiken and across from Augusta on the Georgia side of the … Continue reading Three Valuable Sawmills for Sale

On April Fools’ Day 2022, the government made public the records of the United States Census for 1950. That night I made two discoveries. The first one is that it is almost impossible to find a particular household in the U.S. Census for 1950 without the aid of an index. The second one was a letter my step-grandmother wrote shortly after my maternal grandfather’s death … Continue reading An Old-school Southern Gentleman

One of the things that I learned about my ancestor, Col. David Dobbs, besides him being once a sheriff and later on the chairman of the Democratic Party in Cobb County, was that in 1859, he and several other citizens of Cobb County were authorized by the state of Georgia to build a railroad from Marietta to the Alabama state line. The legislation was entitled … Continue reading Once I Built a Railroad