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Support Our Troops - Not the War! |
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Support Our Troops - Not the War! |
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Introduction: Dear Cousin |
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Table Listing Fabrications and Giving Correct Information |
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Judge Folks Huxford's Credentials |
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Estimating Dates |
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Judge Folks Huxford's Letter about Joel William Smith, II |
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Earliest Settlers of Georgia |
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Hampshire, England Births |
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Early Georgia Records Missing the name Madison Smith |
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Early Cemetery Markers in Georgia |
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Complete Dates from Joel but NO family Bible |
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A DOUBTFUL origin of this Smith family |
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Most Georgia Families Came from states to the north |
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A DOUBTFUL Residence in Washington Co, GA |
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Conclusion |
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Link to a sketch of Joel William Smith, II, the Mythmaker |
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In 1951 the late Judge Folks Huxford of Homerville, Georgia, published volume one of Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia. A sketch of our ancestor, William Smith, Sr.,begins on page 255. That publication unfortunately has helped to perpetuate and give credence to some untruths. It is the purpose of this Open Letter to provide you, the viewer, enough information to understand that many of the so-called facts about the Smith family were made up by a #&@%!$ family historian. After buying a copy of Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia (which I'll call PWG from here on) in 1952, I wrote Judge Huxford and asked him for additional information on Madison Smith, Sr. and his son, Madison Smith, Jr., who he listed as father of our William Smith, Sr. He sent me a long personal letter of explanation, written in his own hand. He mentioned a relative of ours by name, my grandfather Garrason's first cousin, Joel William Smith, II (1893-1969). The Judge wrote that Joel fabricated some of the information and he lamented the fact that when a person is found doing that, all his material becomes suspect. Unwittingly, Joel proved to Huxford that he was making up dates and names when he generously sent the Judge what he reported to be the record from the Bible of the Lang family (not traced on this website), but one from which Joel descended. It was unfortunate for him that the Judge had in his possession the original Bible for that family. A comparison proved that Joel had fabricated that information too. Return to Page One. |
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| William Smith, Sr. was born
16 Mar 1765 and died 17 Jul 1835. |
While I cannot prove when he was born, I can state that this date in 1765 is causing problems for those cousins who want to join Daughters of the American Revolution. Such a birth year makes him only 11 when the Declaration of Independence was signed and only 17 when the war ended in 1782. He couldn't have been much of a soldier even then. His date of death is proven wrong by the fact that he was listed as head-of- household in the 1840 census of Ware County, GA. Huxford's date (PWG, v1, p255) of death of 16 Jul 1841 seems to be the Mythmaker's day and month slightly changed and someone else's year. |
| Mary, wife of William Smith, Sr.,
died in 1834. |
As a young man, when he compiled his History of Clinch County, Georgia, Huxford knew grand- childrenof William Smith, Sr. whose grandmother was not Mary, but Sr.'s second wife Bineta Stephens. Mary obviously died several years before 1809 because Bineta's oldest child was born that year according to tombstone inscriptions. |
| William Smith, Jr. died 3 Mar 1853. | This date can be proven wrong by two items. William, Jr. was listed in the 1860 census of Liberty Co, GA. The first estate papers for him were recorded in the Liberty Co court house in 1867. |
| Mary Ann, wife of William Smith, Jr.,
died 12 Aug 1835. |
This date is proven wrong by the fact that she was listed in the Smith household in the 1850 census of Liberty Co. My estimate of her death in 1853 is not a transposition of "53" for "35", but simply an attempt to place it half way between that 1850 census and the proven remarriage of William, Jr. in 1856. |
| Eleanor Elizabeth (Smith) Hodges,
daughter of William, Jr., whom the Mythmaker called Amanda Elizabeth, was born 20 Jun 1827. |
Her tombstone in Elim Bp Ch Cemetery in present Long Co shows Mrs. E. E. Hodges born 14 Nov 1825. An old Hodges Family Bible owned by Rev. Henry C. Hodges in the 1950s confirmed her first name as Eleanor and repeated the date of birth from her marker. |
| Nancy Ann (Smith) McGowen,
daughter of William Smith, Jr., was born 16 Sep 1817. |
Her marker in Elim Cemetery shows born 15 Dec 1818. |
| Sarah C. (Smith) Foster, daughter
of William Smith, Jr., whom the Mythmaker called Sarah Ann, was born 7 Apr 1819. |
The only record I have of her birthdate is -- Dec 1832 from the 1900 census of Liberty Co. Other censuses suggest she was born in 1832 or 1833. |
| John W. Smith, son of William Smith, Jr., whom the Mythmaker
called John Marion,
was born 9 Feb 1825, married first Mary Eliza Dyess, married second 18 Mar 1858 Ann D. Mahon. |
Note that the Mythmaker's DOB of 1825 for John conflicts with the correct DOB of John's sister Eleanor Elizabeth above. The 1840 census of Liberty Co proves John (listed as John W. in his 20s) was born before 1810; with him was female 15-19 and male under 5, apparently wife and son. Inferior Court minutes of 19 Jul 1841 shows John W. deceased, wife Mary M., orphaned minor son John Madison Smith, with Wm. Smith, Jr. guardian. So JWS could not have married Ann Mahon; she was w/o his son John M. [Incidentally, Ann was d/o Mrs. Mary Ann (Warren) Mahon, who became 2nd wife of John M.'s grandfather, William Smith, Jr. Some suggest JWS's wife was Mary Matilda Flowers -- but no proof -- and that she married 2nd Robert Long.] |
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Most of the above errors can be found either in PWG v1, p255-257 or PWG v5, pp402-403. |
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| It might be helpful to give Judge Folks Huxford's
credentials, so to speak. He was born in 1893, died in 1981, lived
most if not all his life in Homerville, Clinch County, Georgia. He
had worked as a lawyer, county clerk, judge, historian, genealogist and
magazine editor. He was a Baptist minister, though his other endeavors
prevented him pastoring a church fulltime.
As a young man he published a history of Clinch County and one of Brooks County. Later he spent days, weeks, perhaps months, copying genealogical material in Washington, DC and in court houses in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia. His files included the colonial records of Georgia. In 1951 he published the first volume of Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia. In all, he compiled seven volumes. In 1972 some of his friends and concerned genealogists founded the Huxford Genealogical Society to perpetuate his work. He gave the society his files and library. The society continues the Pioneers series, having already published three volumes since his death. The society started its own magazine, the Huxford Genealogical Society Magazine, which continues in print today. The society maintains a library, open to the public, in Homerville. He founded the Georgia Genealogical Magazine, the best such publication I have ever seen. It was chock full of information with no double spacing to make sure a certain number of pages was in an issue. If one could find anything about GGM to criticize, it was his liberal quoting from letters praising his work. As age slowed him down he sold the magazine and its publication was moved to South Carolina. He enjoyed a good reputation in all his fields of interest. He was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Genealogists, a group whose membership is limited to 50 at a time. He was particularly proud that he was the only member living south of Virginia. With this honor came permission to used the coveted FASG after his name. If you were to ask me why Huxford printed material on the Smiths he knew was fabricated, I would have to say that I hope he was not aware it was phony when his first volume went to print. If he did know, I can understand why he did it, but I cannot condone his actions. When, as a young man, he published the Clinch County history, he paid for the printing himself, then could not sell the books. His potential customers were the same people who had given him the genealogical material he had included. They were not willing to part with hard-earned cash to see in print something they already knew. And, likely, some of them could not even read anyway. His family opposed the Pioneers project. Perhaps he thought that is would increase sales if word got around that the Smiths, of whom there were tens-of-thousands of descendants, had been traced back to the immigrant ancestor. Some have suggested that Huxford and the Mythmaker belonged to the same fraternal organization and he could not expose a fellow member as a charlatan. I am not sure of that. Huxford did have a connection to our Smith family. His sister, Clifford Huxford, was the wife of Judge Ezekiel J. Smith, a great-grandson of William Smith, Sr. Cousin Zeke was much closer in generations to William, Sr. than those of us from the Long County branch because he descended from the youngest son by the first wife and the Long County branch came from the oldest son. With fewer generations to forget family stories, I wonder if Cousin Zeke, whom I met once, might have known if there were legends about the Madison Smiths or not. Return to Page One. |
| The viewer with little or no experience
in genealogical research may think: Oh, the Mythmaker was just estimating
those dates. Well, if he was, he was a darn fool! And it was
unfair for him not to tell us they were estimates. A good researcher
always identifies estimates as such. When a genealogist estimates
dates, he is lucky to be anywhere near correct if he deals only in years.
The Mythmaker included months and days, suggesting some written source
that apparently did not really exist!
The case of Mary Ann, wife of William Smith, Jr., above, is a good example. From the census, we know she was living in 1850. We know she was dead in 1856 when her widower remarried. But, there is NOTHING to suggest when she actually died, nothing to suggest how long William grieved for her. It is usually silly to estimate month and day as the Mythmaker may have been doing. Of course, if you know that a couple belonged to a church which practised infant baptism, and you know they had a child christened on 7 Jul 1777, it's a pretty good guess the child was born that year, or late in 1776. But how would you know just how old the infant was when baptised? A day, a week, a month, a year? You don't, so you show a little intelligence and you don't estimate month or day. Sometimes it's easier to estimate a date of death. If a man signed his will on 8 Aug 1888 and it was presented to the probate court for execution a week later, it is obvious he died within that week. But, it is still impossible, knowing only those two facts, to state the actual day of death and it is foolish to attempt to do so. Return to Page One. |
| Huxford wrote in PWG (v1, p255) that William Smith, Sr. was the son
of Madison Smith, Jr., born 1720 in Hampshire, England, who with his father,
Madison Smith, Sr., had come to Georgia in 1733.
In his letter to me, Huxford wrote that in all his research in the colonial
records of Georgia, that is, prior to 1776, he had never found
the name Madison Smith. While my research has been
on a less broad scale, I, too, have never found the name in those old records.
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| In 1949, Professor E. Merlton
Coulter and Albert B. Saye of the University of Georgia published what
amounted to an early census of Georgia[1].
It contains the names of 2,979 persons who either came to Georgia or were
born there between 1732 and 1741. It is arranged in family groupings.
Details include dates of arrival, land grants, occupations, deaths, returns
to Europe and the like. The book's sources were original records
kept by the trustees of the colony, especially the diary of the secretary
of the Earl of Egmont. Needless to say,
the name Madison Smith does not appear in the list.
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| [1] A List of the Early Settlers of Georgia. Athens (GA): University of Georgia Press, 1967 (1949). |
| The Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) has
microfilmed the parish records of Europe and computerized them in their
International Genealogical Index (IGI). A check of the parish records
for Hampshire, England
did not show anyone named Madison Smith. While some records were lost and some were not made available for filming, I concede that if there were men named Madison Smith and if they did come from England, and if they were Baptist there would be no parish records for them because that church does not record that type of information. Return to Page One. |
| Now, it should be understood that if the Madison Smiths really existed anywhere except in the Mythmaker's mind, in Georgia . . . | |
| . | they never bought land
they never received a grant of land from king or government they never sold land they never paid taxes they never voted they never made a will they never left an estate to be administered they never served in the local militia they never did anything criminal |
| . . . or if they did, all record of such activities have been lost. Do you really think, with the rather completeness of civil records for colonial Georgia that they could have lived there, raised families and have escaped entirely the records. Let me answer that: Not likely! I have left out marriages, births and deaths because those records were kept by the Church of England and all such records have been lost. Return to Page One. | |
| If the viewer is not familiar with the Liberty
[now Long] County area of Georgia where our Smiths settled, it will be
helpful for me to mention that south Georgia has no native stone.
If anything is to be built of stone, or trimmed in it, whether a court
house, a well-curbing or a grave marker, the material must be imported,
so to speak, in colonial times from the northern states (because north
Georgia still belonged to the Indians) or later from the upper parts of
the state.
In colonial days, only the wealthy could afford stone markers. Poor folks, and our Smiths were surely among them, marked the graves as best they could. The material of choice was fat-lightered pine boards with no inscription, which were set into the ground at the head of the graves. It took centuries for that hardened wood to disentigrate. However, while the graves might be still marked in modern times, the identity of the deceased buried there must pass by word-of-mouth. There are no stone markers for any of the early Smiths. The grave of William Smith, Sr. (in Arabia cemetery at Bethany Baptist Church in northern Clinch County, GA) was not marked until 1950 when a concrete slab was poured and a military issue stone marker was placed on it. The graves of William Smith, Jr., his wife, presumably his mother, and other members of the family (in a private cemetery in Rye Patch community in present Long County, GA) were originally marked with similar boards. In the 1930s, concrete slabs were poured over the graves, and using myth-information supplied by the Mythmaker, the supposed identities of those resting there were scratched into the wet concrete. A short time later, the cemetery was visited by Ida (Hodges) Barry, who was nine years old when her grandfather William Smith, Jr. was buried there in 1867, and who had as a girl helped her mother Eleanor Elizabeth (Smith) Hodges clean the cemetery countless times. She told Sallie (Stewart) Garrason, her niece and my grandmother, that the graves were marked wrong. The most serious mistake was that one slab contained the name of William Smith, Sr. who rests some 100 miles away. Later the woods surrounding the cemetery were cleared and the area became a field. In time the slabs were literally destroyed by careless operators of farm machinery. In 1995 a chain-link fence was installed and a large marble stone was erected with all the names of those known to have been buried there. Return to Page One. |
| I have mentioned before that the Mythmaker could
not have gotten his dates from a family Bible because they were so far
wrong. Let me emphasize that I have never heard of an existing
Smith Family Bible record, not even for the generation of William Smith,
Jr.'s son, James Madison, from whom I descend. None was mentioned
to me, even when I served for a short time as the Smith family historian.
I do not believe the Mythmaker had access to any Bible record. I
believe he made up all the dates and many of the names.
Now, in spite of any Bible record, the Mythmaker came up with a list of six children for Madison Smith, Jr. and was able to provide complete (that is day, month and year) births and deaths for them. A sister of the Mythmaker copied some of his information for me, when I was not offered his records as family historian. For whatever reason, she did not copy names for the wife of either Madison, Sr. or Jr., nor the spouses of any of Madison, Jr.'s supposed five children, excepting William, Sr. The list included daughters who lived to be 57, 59 and 54. Besides William Smith, Sr. there were supposedly two sons, one killed in the War of 1812 at age about 43 (my estimate based on supposed birth in 1769) and another who died age 51. I have refused to include the names of these children here because I do not want to distribute them to persons who want to believe they really existed. They didn't, or if they did, no one can prove it. I apologize for being responsible for these persons having been listed in a history of Jones Creek Church[2] in Long County. Our late cousin, Elmer O. Parker, compiled it. He was a historian and genealogist, retired from National Archives. I delayed answering his request for information, and because he was pressed to complete the book, he used the Mythmaker's records. As a youth he had admired the Mythmaker and was quite shocked when I showed him Judge Huxford's letter accusing him of fabrications. A revised edition of the book was published in 2000. Unfortunately, Elmer did not eliminate the information he got from Joel, but instead, included a caveat stating that some researchers did not agree with the information he had included. |
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| [2]Elmer Oris Parker. History of Jones Creek Baptist Church. 1st ed. Greenville (SC): A Press, 1985. |
| So, if the Smiths didn't come to Georgia in
Oglethorpe's time, when did they come and from where? I am not really
sure. There are two other possibilities, one probably and the other
rather doubtful.
Let's discuss the doubtful origin first. My great grandfather, James Osgood Garrason (1846-1930), who married
Charity Annette Smith (1853-1906), granddaughter of William Smith, Jr.,
told his grandchildren that they were English, Scottish, Irish and Salzburger.
I know the origin of the English, Scottish and Irish descents. I
am unsure about the Salzburger.
That takes us to a more likely possibility . . . |
| First, a little background is in order. It
is not generally known, but most immigrants from Europe did not come directly
to Georgia or the Carolinas or even Virginia. It is true that in
the settlement of Georgia, some ships brought the first English to Savannah,
the first Scots to Darien, the first Germans to Ebenezer -- but those were,
in modern language, "charter ships".
Folks who came alone or in small groups usually debarked in Boston, New York or Philadelphia. The reason becomes apparent if you look at a world map. Sail directly west from England and you arrive in northern Canada because Europe is much further north than the United States. Actually, once those three cities were established they outgrew the ports of Virginia and the Carolinas in importance, and they long predated the port of Savannah. Ship captains would drop off passengers and freight at one of those northern ports, reload and head for their next port, which was usually back in Europe. It was up to the immigrant to make his way south if that is where he wanted to go. The wealthy could buy passage on ships that sailed up and down the coast. Others had to take their time going south. For some it took generations. The Bowen family is a perfect example. They left Wales and settled in present Rhode Island in 1634. A few generations later, perhaps feeling the pressure of an expanding population, some of the family moved south to New Jersey. Some generations later, several family groups ventured on to Duplin County, North Carolina. Shortly after the American Revolution, perhaps enticed by the promise of free land, some moved on to south Georgia where they settled in present Bulloch, Tattnall and Effingham counties. I have not traced them on west, except to the Valdosta, Georgia area, but likely some finally made California. It is reasonable to assume that our Smiths got off the boat up north and gradually made their way south. If you were to count all the families traced in the Pioneers of Wiregrass Georgia series and determine what percentage of them had come directly into Georgia the figure would be very low indeed. Return to Page One. |
| In 1784, shortly after the American Revolution
ended, Georgia organized two large counties from land recently acquired
from the Indians. These two counties were narrow, but quite long,
and ran along the western edge of the original counties which hung along
the Savannah River and the Atlantic Ocean. The lower county was named
for George Washington, the upper one for Benjamin Franklin. The southern
end of Washington County adjoined the northwestern boundary of old Liberty
County.
To encourage people from the other states to settle in Georgia, land grants were offered in the new counties, with special attention to men who claimed to have been Revolutionary Soldiers. Common soldiers received 287½ acres, high ranking officers multiples of that figure. For the longest time, it was my impression that the military land grants were scattered all over the county, but recently a cousin trying to prove that an ancestor was a soldier was told by the Daughters of the American Revolution that if she could show that the ancestor's grant was in that area of Washington County which later became Greene County, her claim that he was a soldier would be accepted. Does it surprize you to learn that one of the men who was granted land in Washington County was named William Smith? In fact there were several grants to that name. Was he our William Smith? There is no way to prove it, unless signatures on documents could be compared. William Smith is just too common a name for anyone to jump to conclusions and say that the one in Washington County was ours. One cousin did that. This cousin, the late Patrick Sellars of Waycross, GA, submitted the Bible record of John Woods Smith (grandson of William, Sr.) for publication in the Huxford Genealogical Society Magazine. In a note he mentioned that the Smiths had come to Georgia from Moore County, North Carolina. While that claim is possible, . Sellars' note referred to a power-of-attorney signed in 1790 by William Smith of Washington Co, GA, giving William Miers authority to conduct some business for him in Moore Co, NC. Return to Page One. |
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No family can trace back to Adam and Eve -- in spite of some folks having published books doing just that. Don't believe it. Books can be wrong! As I have matured I have become more reluctant to list unproven ancestors in my tree. If they can't be proven, they don't belong there. I can be proud only of 100% genuine ancestors. My own Garrason line ends with proof in North Carolina in the 1750s. There is a possibility of taking that line back three more generations to an immigrant Dutchman in Delaware in the late 1600s, but I hesitate for lack of proof. It is hypocritical to proudly claim descent from an ancestor who never existed, but there is no shame in beginning the Smith line with the Reverend William Smith, Sr. As a father, farmer, minister, justice, unproven Revolutionary Soldier but proven Soldier in the War of 1812, he is a proper ancestor to begin the Smith line -- one of whom we can all be proud. Calder |
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