Category: Genealogy

Aunt Edythe had this bible and George included a scan of the pages in his giant book of genealogy. I thought I would try to transcribe it. The bible belonged to Dr. Robert Bell Smith Hargis who was a doctor in Pensacola before and after the Civil War. He played a pretty prominent position in the fight against yellow fever, writing a couple of books about it, and also getting yellow fever in the process. Dr. Hargis, originally from North Carolina, wasn’t related to us, but his wife was a descendant of Dr. Eugene Sierra, like us. Their son, Dr. John Whiting Hargis, married Paw-Paw’s sister, Edythe Grant (hmmm . . . also a descendant of Dr. Sierra; by my calculations they were second cousins, once removed), and their daughter was Mom’s cousin, Edythe.

Each page has two columns, so I am including the headers for those columns as “Births,” “Marriages,”, or “Deaths.” In keeping with the format of the original pages, some additional marriages and deaths were added at the end. Some of it is hard to read and I may not have gotten things right, and some is impossible to read. I will post pictures if I get them.

Continue reading “Hargis Family Bible”

I feel like I have charted out most of the family tree that I can, or at least that I want to chart, so I was copying information from familysearch.org to a spreadsheet I have of all the people in the tree. This is pretty good, because it makes me go back and look at people and see if I’m missing anything or if I want to do a little more research. Lately I have been working on the children of Alexander Grant, Jr., who is Mom’s great-grandfather (the son of Scotsman Alexander Grant). He had a lot of kids, mostly born in New Orleans, but at some point after the Civil War they all moved to Pensacola. One of his daughters, Kate Grant, married an Irishman named Martin Sullivan who, with his brother Daniel, started the First National Bank of Pensacola, owned a lot of land in Florida with timber, started a lumber yard, and bought a railroad. He described his occupation on one census as “capitalist” and died a millionaire in 1911. The second in charge at a bank was often the cashier, and the cashier at First National was W. A. S. Wheeler. William Wheeler married another one of Alexander Grant’s daughters, Julia Grant. They had 3 daughters before Julia died at age 32 in 1892 and got a really nice gravestone at Saint Michaels Cemetery in Pensacola. The youngest of William and Julia’s daughters was Emelie Wheeler (spelled “Amelie” later in life). After Julia died, W. A. S. Wheeler moved to Natchez, Mississippi, and Emelie became a New Orleans debutante. She married Robert Irby, the son of a very wealthy tobacco executive in New Orleans named William Irby. William Irby was also a New Orleans philanthropist who saved some historic French Quarter buildings and donated them to schools and museums. Tulane has a dormitory named for him. There is a great article about him here.

Continue reading “The Russian Prince”

Mom’s grandmother’s maiden name was Velma McCord, who was born in Corinth in the northern part of Mississippi in 1881. Her father was Rufus Chapman McCord who was born near Moulton, in the northern part of Alabama. There were a bunch of McCords around Moulton, but they seem to have left, many moving to Corinth, but others going to Tennessee. I’m not sure what the draw to Corinth was, but there was another family of McCords there as well which may be unrelated or at best distantly related. Rufus’ father was William J. McCord who lived in Moulton for a while, but was born in Tennessee. He had a family bible, which like many family bibles, was used to write down important family information like births, marriages, and deaths.

William really took this seriously, or at least people in his family did. The text of what was written can be found on web pages here and here, part of a project by a McCord now living in Georgia to put all of the McCord bible information in one place. William McCord’s bible is a treasure trove of information. Some of this information is available through public records like the census, marriage licenses, death certificates, etc. as well as some gravestones that have been indexed, but this is a ton of information about the family all in one place and very complete. And it is pretty accurate as well, confirmed with some of that other information when it is available.
Continue reading “The McCords”

For some reason I got the genealogy bug and I have been doing a lot of research the last couple of weeks. I want to get as much done as I can and then stop. It’s like putting together a puzzle, but I don’t want to make a career out of this puzzle.

I’ve been able to come up with a few different resources that have turned out to be pretty helpful and just want to list those.

One great resource is ancestry.com. A lot of people do genealogy and share their family trees there, plus they also have a ton of resources that are easy to look up. If you know a person’s name and the county they lived in, you should be able to find stuff out about them, which is pretty amazing considering a lot of the records are around 100 years old. You have to pay a monthly fee to use the best features of ancestry.com (some of it is free), but you can get a two-week trial which I am making good use of. And lately I am finding that familysearch.org’s Search feature (as opposed to its Find feature which is used to find people) is good for getting some of the same records as Ancestry has.
Continue reading “Genealogy Research”

This week I started doing some research on the internet on my ancestors. This started by finding out about Dr. Eugenio Sierra and then I started trying to connect the dots in between. While Sierra was from Spain, another branch of the family goes back to Scotland and the name Grant. I knew Grant was a Scottish name and that the Grants were a clan in Scotland. So this Scottish heritage goes back to the 1800’s when Alexander Grant comes to New Orleans from Scotland. He is my great great great grandfather. I’m thinking he had some money because he bought a couple of sugar plantations around New Orleans (in Plaquemines Parish, which is famous for being so devastated by Hurricane Katrina; hurricanes caused problems for Grant as well), ran stores in New Orleans, and owned a bunch of property there. He certainly had a house in New Orleans, though it isn’t there anymore. Here is a picture of the house, taken in the 1930’s:

Continue reading “Alexander Grant, Sr.”