a non-house post

Turning my attention away from the real estate cyclone in which I live, I did a little non-family genealogical research. My Grandma's family, the Paynes, lived across the road from a black family in rural Bibb County, Alabama, when she was a child. This family was named Johnson; the parents were Rance and Mandy. Rance and Mandy had several adult children when Grandma was little, and they had a grandson named Rudolph who was just her age.

I've heard stories about the Johnsons, how kind they were and what a good cook Mandy was. My favorite is the fact that Grandma learned to ride a bicycle on Rudolph's bike, despite the fact that it only had one pedal. They owned their home, which was still standing when I was a child but has long since collapsed into the earth and kudzu.

Down the road behind Rance and Mandy's house was the home their daughter and her husband rented and lived in with their family. Their names were Mamie and Thomas Smelley, and they had lots of daughters and two sons. One of their sons was accidentally shot in a hunting accident; he made it home, bleeding profusely, but didn't live long. He was only about 14. There's a faint outline of the blood stain on the floor in one room of that house.

How do I know this? Because I was married on the front porch of that house, sometimes called the Fitts place because it was built in 1868 by T. J. Fitts. My great-grandparents bought it in 1953, and my great-uncle owns it now. So our families have been virtually intertwined for the better part of a century.

Today I looked through a database of Alabama death records to see if I could find the record for the child who died by accidental shooting. (I know where he is buried but haven't had a chance to go out there to check the date.) I found it, but for some reason I decided to keep looking at records for that family. I found what I believe was Thomas Smelley's death record, in Selma in 1940. I jumped back a generation and looked for Rance and Mandy, and I located Mandy's maiden name -- Fitts.

And then all of a sudden the original relationship between the Fitts and Johnson families dawned on me. In the 1870 census, two-year-old Mandy lives with her parents, Jacob and Classy Fitts, next door to the T. J. Fitts family. Since "the Fitts place" was buit in 1868, that's probably the home the white Fitts family was living in. I wonder if the little house at the beginning of the road, what I knew as the tumbledown ruins of Rance and Mandy's house, was where the former slaves Jake and Classy lived.

So I have this vision of a woman cradling her bleeding son on the floor of a home built by the owner of her grandparents. I can't quite get my head around this.

Jennifer