Storytime: Gen 6

When we received this assignment in class, I remembered my Gigi telling me about her brother in law researching her family. Jerry Breed, her sisters husband (Gigi's brother in law) traveled the country and used ancestory.com to find out a great deal of information about my family. As it turns out, my mothers side of the family dates back to 1695 in Germany! It was so interesting to find out that I am very German (on both my mothers side and my fathers side) because I am actually traveling to Germany over winter break... it is going to be so cool to see where my ancestors lived! 

Saphronia Beaver with son James
Franklin Beaver

Jerry Breed was able to get information dating all the way back to 1695, starting with generation 1, but what I found interesting while reading this report was a woman mentioned in generation 6. Saphronia Hazeltine Abernathy, Gigi's great grandmother, had an entire page of notes based on her life. She was born September 4th, 1840 in Hanging Dog Church, Cherokee and lived to be about 40 years old when she died in 1880 in Georgia. Based on the notes and stories from my great grandmother, Ruth Hagood, Saphronia Hazeltine Abernathy was quite the woman. 

Saphronia Abernathy married a man, Albert Deweese, and gave birth to a son William and then moved to Henrysville in Logan County, Kentucky around 1860. Her first husband, Albert, enlisted in the Civil War and she was widowed shortly after. Saphronia Abernathy and her children somehow made their way back to Cherokee County where she gave birth to another daughter, Ann (Nettie). It is said that Nettie's father was Jehu Reed, a man with a horrible reputation... he had reports of being a bushwhacker, abusive to his wife and children... Jehu Reed was even killed by his own cousins! People spoke harshly about Saphronia's life, judging her for her constant marriages... but you have to think, she was married by 16 and widowed by 23 with two children. She did what she could in order for her children to have a life, therefor she had to marry Jehu Reed for support, despite his reputation. After his death, luckily, things started to get better when she married into my family by marrying Samuel Stewart Beaver (B. 1846 D. 1930) in North Carolina, 1870. They moved to Georgia where she gave birth to my Gigi's grandfather, James Franklin Beaver (1878), and happily lived out the rest of her life until her death in 1880.