The Questionable End of Armant Plantation

The Armant Brothers were like other antebellum plantation owners along the Mississippi River. They loved a good bet. Endowed with the recent inheritance of their father, Jean Baptiste Armant’s plantation, in 1858, the Armant Brothers had money with which to gamble.  Their profitable 1150-acre sugarcane plantation was located on the Mississippi River between present-day Oak…

A Picture is Worth More Than a Thousand Words

Images of our ancestors are the golden nuggets of family history.  Often we are not able to find an image of an ancestor, but when we do, even when the image is small and faded, it gives life to their name and dates.  When you look into the eyes of people who lived so long…

St. David’s Church – Standing Guard

The old white sentinel stands resolutely over the many silent headstones that surround its 241-year-old wooden frame.  It has witnessed years of war interspersed with years of peace and both have shaped its colorful history in Cheraw, South Carolina. Having been commissioned in 1768 and built in 1770, St. David’s Church saw the tumult and…

The Curious Civil War Photo

The well-worn, crimson-colored velvet album of the Broome family contains many family photos from the turn of the century as well as some photos and tintypes from the Civil War era.  But one curious photo loosely stashed alongside other less curious photos in the back of the album caught my attention. The photo, small and…

A Pile of Cotton and a Lighted Pine Knot

Angeline was out behind her house stirring the family’s clothes in the hot, soapy water in her iron washtub.  Suddenly 54-year-old Jeremiah*, one of her most trusted slaves, came running up the path toward her. “Union soldiers are coming up the bayou!” he shouted, nearly out of breath.  Jeremiah had discovered that a runaway slave had gone…

Ashley, Ashley, Ashley….

Sometimes a family name takes on a life of its own. In the Holloway family the name is Ashley.  It has found its way into every generation of our Holloway family beginning with its original possessor born in 1830. Oddly enough, this Ashley was never a blood relative of the Holloway family. The name originally…

The Woman Wore Black

Mary Mariah Louisa Currie Morgan (1824-1900) As Mary sat down in the firm wooden chair in front of the large boxy camera in the photographer’s studio in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, she called her little great grand-daughter, Olivette, to come over to her.  Mary held her tightly just as she had done so many times with her…

Southern Unionists?

The assumption that all people who lived in the South between 1861-1865 were supporters of the Confederacy would be mistaken.  Not only were there supporters of the Union living in the South, but a regiment formed in New Orleans in 1864, the 1st Regiment New Orleans Infantry,  was made up of Southern Unionists. Timothy Lawrence…