TRAVIS HARDIN'S GENEALOGY AND DOWN HOME PAGE
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GEDCOM and pedigree of Travis
Hardin
including collateral
lines.
Please note: Not everything is proven. Please do not distribute the GEDCOM without that warning. Contact me about my sources if the documentation leaves doubt. THE FAMILIES
This mystery picture was made about 1917, perhaps at the Farill, Alabama Baptist church. Farill is in Cherokee County, Alabama, near the Georgia line. Many of my ancestors lived there from the 1860's. The girl at far left in the middle row with her head turned was identified by my aunt as Bertha May Hardin (1902-1987), married Ed Smith. In the row in front of her, second person from the left, is her cousin Nessie LaVada Hardin (1907-1971), unmarried. The picture was in the possession of Frank Hardin at his death. If you can identify anyone else, please contact me and I will caption the picture. Among the names in the area were: Hardin, Chandler, Bouchellon, Barkley, Story, Ingram, Smith, Isbel, Roe, Kirby,and Mormon.
A SOUTHEASTERN FAMILY Many of my ancestors took the same paths of migration as the Scots-Irish, though some of them might have originated in southern England. The Scots-Irish arrived in the 1700's at Eastern ports, usually Philadelphia. After living a time in southern Pennsylvania or New Jersey, they drifted south by way of Virginia, the western Carolinas, thence into Georgia and Alabama, and onward to Texas and points west. It is said that Staunton, Virginia is, even today, one of the most Scots-Irish cities in the nation. My branch settled on the Georgia-Alabama line in Cherokee County, Alabama, and Floyd County, Georgia just after the Cherokees were expelled. My ancestors, as far as I know, were the salt-of-the-earth types, the "backbone of America," and cannon fodder whenever they could not escape that fate. Three of my distant Hardin uncles--perhaps cousins technically--were Confederate privates. Two of them died, while the family they left behind lost a father and two children in 1863, probably to some epidemic. My ancestor Samuel Story was conscripted in Georgia as a private and was only injured. During Korea, two Hardin uncles of mine were killed. Beyond tragedy, the only fame I have so far encountered is that a distant uncle, James Asa Hardin, was particularly active in securing the consolidated school near Key and Forney, on the Centre-Cave Spring highway in Cherokee County. The school, a junior high school, bore his name until it was abandoned, I believe, in the 1960's. There's the tenuous Emma Sansom connection, Emma Samsom being a young Civil War heroine from Gadsden, Alabama. "We're somehow kin to her," my mother would say. Just a little, it turns out. She married a Christopher Bullard Johnson, who was the great-grand uncle of my mother. They moved to Texas. My ancestors achieved another kind of fame by multiplying their genes exponentially. Until the end of my grandfather's generation -- he had nine children and his wife Minnie died with number 10 -- families of 10 and 12 were the norm for my ancestors. The modern trend to smaller families began for us about 1935, with his children.
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