Now that the New Year has started, here I am slapped right in the face with a case of a grave that piques my curiosity.
At the end of the 1890s, a company tried to start a community on the land where old Br'er's warren sits. Sadly, it failed and was almost totally vanished by 1930. There is virtually nothing remaining of it except part of the name of a few streets. I only learned about the failed community relatively recently. There is very little documentation of or even reference to it anywhere.
So you can imagine my shock where I saw the community name in an obituary last week! I think it is possibly the only reference to it in the major local paper the entire time it existed!
Naturally, I had to investigate!
As the man said, "Be careful what you start. It may be a dragon that ends up consuming you." I pulled the dragon's tail, and it woke up.
Meet Vesti. Or Vasti. It appears as each spelling on different documents. I suspect it was intended to be Vesta. That was a common enough name in the 19th century. And all things considered, if that is the case, it is a minor miracle that it came through spelled that close to the original.
Montreal Station. That is what caught my attention. The notices were from 1930.
We will get back to Vesti herself later. First, I learned some details that bear on the whole story.
Obviously, we are talking about Georgia with all the history that comes with it. The first death notice not only gave me the Montreal Station reference but the Hanley name as well. I had a memory that it was a Black funeral home. Keep in mind that Segregation was still the law at the time. And I had visited Anderson Cemetery before and knew it to be a Black cemetery dating to the early part of the 20th century.
Checking Anderson Cemetery in Find A Grave, I find multiple Fowlers. And Vesti is missing her birth details. Not even a birth year. When was Vesti born? And where? Is she related to these other Fowlers?
My task was clear. What wasn't clear was where I would end up and what I would learn.
It wasn't long before I realized that I needed to build a Fowler tree if I were to have any hope at success.
If you have never tried to research a Black family's genealogy, then you cannot fully appreciate what I found. Recall that prior to Emancipation, anyone in slavery was property. Chattle. There was no difference between a slave and a horse or cow in the official documentation. Not until the 1870 US Census were Blacks counted as people unless they were free.
If you can get anyone much beyond that 1870 date, then you have done something.
I done something!
I quickly learned that Vesti was born in May of 1890 to Mason and Lucy Fowler. And I realized that she was one of eight surviving of the nine children her mother had born as of the 1900 Census.
This alone is a better than average result researching a single Black woman born in the 19th century in the deep south. But this is just a start! I also found her Death Certificate (where I first discovered her parents' names and confirmed her grave location).
Having a person and parents in hand was the point where I started the tree in earnest. The 1900 Census indicated that Mason was born about 1860 and Lucy about 1863, both in Georgia (hardly a surprise). What more could I glean about them?
As it turned out, quite a bit!
Beyond finding the couple and their children in the 1880 Census, and the couple alone in the 1870 Census, I found their marriage record from 18 Dec 1879.
But wait! There is more!
Now I had two named families to trace; Fowler and Wood. Let's stay on the Fowler line for the moment.
Not unsurprisingly, Mason first appears in the records in the 1870 Census at age 11. Ah, ha! He was born in 1859, not 1860!
Side note: I think it is an almost 100% probability that the death record, death certificate, or obituary for anyone born in the 19th century will be disproven by census records. I am shocked if the year is only off by one.
The 1870 Census gave me Mason's parents! James (born about 1833) and Elizabeth (Born about 1834). I was surprised to see that Elizabeth gave her birth state as South Carolina. Even assuming she was born in South Carolina, close to the Georgia border, she still made a significant journey to end up in the area in Georgia where she and James could meet. Did she relocate before or after Emancipation? Was her migration her choice? Or was she sold? Did her owner move and take her with him? Or something else?
Regretfully, I cannot find anything that sheds light on that question.
Regretfully, I cannot find anything that sheds light on that question.
Still, I did manage to find another rarish record. I found James and Elizabeth's marriage record from 14 May 1869! So now I had her maiden name, too. Great?
Alas, this was as far back as I could trace either James or Elizabeth. Still, this is a much better than expected result. And I did manage to identify four of Mason's siblings. Perhaps they, too, had remained in the area, leaving records behind.
I tried to align their details with the 1860 Slave Schedule to see if the data might indicate where the Fowler and Hollingsworth name might have originated (i.e., did they adopt their former owner's surname after Emancipation as many freed slaves did?) But, unfortunately, that led to a dead-end. Either there were no results, or there were too many possibilities.
I tried to align their details with the 1860 Slave Schedule to see if the data might indicate where the Fowler and Hollingsworth name might have originated (i.e., did they adopt their former owner's surname after Emancipation as many freed slaves did?) But, unfortunately, that led to a dead-end. Either there were no results, or there were too many possibilities.
I leave Mason's siblings aside for the moment and return to his wife, Lucy. Can I trace her line?
Maybe.
Lucy and Mason married in 1879 and appear without other family members on the 1880 Census. Searching for Lucy Wood does return a family in Georgia on the 1870 Census. I cannot confirm that this is our Lucy. However, it is the only Lucy Wood of the correct age and race coming up in Georgia, and the location is not terribly far from where she and Mason married and lived, so it may be her.
Assuming for the moment that this is our Lucy, we have intriguing new data. The 1870 Census has a seven year old Black girl, apparently the daughter of Jefferson (age 50) and Melissa Wood (age 45), along with several siblings and one very interesting woman: Mary Jennings, age 80, born in Virginia.
If the typical pattern applies here, Mary is most likely Melissa's mother, thus Jefferson's mother-in-law and Lucy's maternal grandmother. If, and this is a big 'if,' this is Lucy and her family, then Mary is Vesti's great-grandmother and was born in Virginia ca. 1790. Tracing a Black family to the 18th century is akin to finding a seven-leaf clover; it is possible but exceedingly rare. I only wish I could confirm this relationship.
At this point, I started fleshing out Vasti's siblings. That ended up being the frustrating exercise I fully anticipated when I started. It seems they scattered to the four winds. One brother may - and I emphasize "may" - have married in Missouri unusual - but understandable - circumstances. I present to you the court order involved. Judge for yourself.
I cannot stop imagining the bride's father with a pistol in his pocket. I found a divorce record from Detroit two years later that would seem to state that she divorced him for abuse and desertion.
Gee. Who would have predicted that?
Closer to home, I found one of Vasti's brothers did remain in the general area, marry, father several children, and, sadly, lose two of those children at or before birth.
One already had a Find A Grave memorial, but the other did not. Yes, I corrected that oversight and submitted updates to link all the parents and children, dates, locations, marriages, etc., that I could identify.
Alas, Elmer and his wife, Nannie Lou (George - I cannot locate her grave - she appears to have passed in the 1920s) lost at least a third daughter, Odessa. Odessa accounts for several firsts in my research.
First off, this is the first time I have encountered someone in a sanitarium. No, Odessa was not insane. A sanitarium at the time equates to what would be a long-term health care facility today. There was no cure for Tuberculosis at that time. The best that could be done for a patient was to mitigate the symptoms and make the person as comfortable as possible.
On another side note, the Battle Hill Sanitarium was located near the "new" and "fashionable" West View Cemetery near Atlanta. I am sure that having a cemetery so close by was a great comfort to patients with a terminal disease.
Second, never before have I encountered a death certificate where the deceased's details were supplied by the hospital from its records.
Third, and most interestingly, the burial location is a first for me. I initially read it as "Emory View." That name made no sense to me. Nor could I locate any reference to such a cemetery. Only after I enlarged the image was I aware that it read "Emory Univ." Emory University is a (mostly) medical school near Atlanta. It was a moment of clarity. Emory is always in need of cadavers for the medical students, and the costs of burying someone during the Depression had to be financially crippling to a Black family in the south. So, if there was a plan to bury Odessa at Chestnut Hill (as was initially entered), it is entirely understandable if that changed to donating her body to science.
By this point, I had spent the better part of two or three days at the computer, poring over online records, building the tree. I needed a break and fresh air. What better excuse to go roam about a cemetery? Off to Anderson Cemetery! Are there Fowler headstones to find?
Oy! Let me answer that question simply by saying, "Damned if I know. Maybe?"
Expectations collided with reality. And expectations lost.
I had been to Anderson Cemetery before and remembered it as about half an acre of moderately maintained grounds. But, I had not really explored it before. It turned out to be closer to three acres of mostly abandoned and grown chaos.
This is Anderson Cemetery as I recalled it.
See those trees in the back of the photos? That is where Hell begins.
Born in West Virginia, served in WWI in a Pioneer regiment, and buried in Georgia? There has to be a story there.
But it will have to wait for another time.
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