Three Georgia counties will be celebrating their 200th anniversary this year and next.
Gwinnett, Hall and Walton counties were created in December 1818. They were named for our state’s signers of the Declaration of Independence — Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall and George Walton, three men who also had been governors.
The men are the subject of the book “Georgia’s Signers and the Declaration of Independence,” published in 1981 by Cherokee Publishing Company. The book is coauthored by Edwin C. Bridges, Hardy Jackson and James Harvey Young, with a genealogical article on each one that I contributed based on work I previously published in Georgia Life magazine. The book is still in print.
This fall also marks the 100th anniversary of the Georgia Archives, as well as the founding of Fort Benning (at first Camp Benning), near Columbus, and the armistice that ended World War I — once referred to as “the war to end all wars.”
Georgia Book and Paper Fair
The Georgia Antiquarian Booksellers Association will host the Georgia Book and Paper Fair during the Decatur Book Festival, September 1 and 2. The fair will take place at the Ebster Recreation Center, two blocks from the Decatur Square at Trinity Place and Electric Avenue. This old book event is always a great place to find lots of historical and genealogical materials. I have made some great discoveries ever since I attended my first book fair decades ago. Open 11 a.m. until 6 p.m. on Saturday, and 11 a. m. until 5 p. m. on Sunday. See gaba.net for further information.
How did your ancestors meet?
Each issue of Family Tree Magazine contains a research question. September’s is: “What have you learned about how your parents and other couples in your family tree met?” You should record what you know about those in your immediate tree, leaving a record for posterity. My maternal grandparents met because her sister married his uncle. My paternal grandparents met via the church choir. My great-grandparents supposedly met on Valentine’s Day 1886 in Columbus, Georgia, when he arrived by boat from Eufaula and she happened to be near the dock that day. Newspapers verified the boat’s arrival. Civil War pensions indicate one ancestral Georgia aunt met her future husband from Tennessee when he returned from the war with her brother.
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