Finding Your Folks: Getting back to the Tidwells

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? And I really appreciate your patience as I recuperated from open heart surgery and had to drop the ball here, at least temporarily. I am doing much better, thank you, and am going to attempt to get these columns going once again, picking up where we left off with the family of William Tidwell and Mary Amelia Jones.

Why am I doing this family? Well, several years ago and again last summer, I did a big series on the Boyds of Bethany UMC in north Fayette County and on the many families buried there. Millie Tidwell was the mother of all these Boyds and the Tidwells and Boyds are related to just about everyone in that cemetery.

As everyone who does genealogy knows, we go on and on about the male lines in our families, but tend to overlook the female lines. Having found a great book on the Tidwells, I decided it was time we discussed Millie’s family and her ancestors. In so doing, I discovered a whole bunch of people I didn’t know were related to this line and it gave me a chance to develop and write about more families who settled in the Fayette-Coweta-South Fulton area.

The bottom line: Helping more people to “find their folks.”

We had covered much of the Tidwell, Westmoreland and Jones families from the book, “McCall-Tidwell and Allied Families,” written by Allie Tidwell McCall back in 1931. This book covers the Tidwell families of the two orphaned brothers, William and Benjamin Tidwell, who moved to Georgia following the death of both their parents during the Revolutionary War.

The brothers were inseparable, moving first to central Georgia and later, when western lands were opened up with the 1827 Land Lottery, into the Coweta-Meriwether area. These families are of particular interest because their descendants became core families of many later-developing communities, such as the Bethany community in Fayette, the communities surrounding Senoia, Digby, Brooks, Haralson and Alvaton, and the Fairburn-Fife area.

Before we begin again, let me explain that I am serving two audiences here and will have to do a little backtracking. This column is read in its hard copy form (the newspaper) which goes to Fayette, Coweta and South Fulton counties, and via the Internet where it is read worldwide. It’s easy for the people reading on the Internet to click on a previous link and bring themselves up to date on the last family we discussed.

But, unless the people reading the newspaper have kept them for the past four months, that last column is long gone, probably used in someone’s bird cage.

So, I’m going to recap a little, to bring those hard copy readers up to speed.

I hope that, if and when you can, those of you reading the series will jump in if you can add something — or if you catch us in a mistake. Mary Harper has already cleared up some errors we had on the Batte and Jones families.

In my last column, I was attempting to give a little more information on the children of William Tidwell and Mary Amelia Jones. Amelia was a descendant of Capt. Richard Jones of Virginia whose family made its way down into Georgia and settled in Jasper County. From there, Amelia traveled on to the Meriwether-Coweta area with her husband, William Tidwell.

William was a descendant of John Tidwell, also of Virginia. The Tidwells made their way through South Carolina into Georgia and settled in Greene County, and later in the Baldwin-Putnam County area. William Tidwell and Mary Amelia Jones are said to have had the majority of their children (seven of nine) while they were living in Putnam County. The last two were born in Coweta-Meriwether.

I have to use that double term because William’s land was right on the border of Meriwether and Coweta counties, north of Mt. Carmel Methodist Church, east of Haralson. Some was in Coweta and some was in Meriwether. I have spent many hours in the Meriwether courthouse in the past few weeks, gathering information on William Tidwell’s estate settlement. The man appeared to be richer than King Midas. Why he didn’t leave a will is beyond me.

The land transactions between the children just before and after his death take up more than two pages in the deed index books. The estate settlement, including the inventory appraisement and sale, take up many pages.

If you want this information, you will have to either copy it by hand at the Meriwether Courthouse (you can’t make photocopies of old probate records) or you could probably find it on microfilm at the Georgia Archives. I am copying it all by hand and will submit it to the Meriwether County GenWeb Archives online when I finish transcribing it.

When I research a family, I like to do it as completely as I can. That means finding all I can on Mom and Dad and their parents, all Mom and Dad’s children, the children’s spouses, and the children’s children. This includes all dates and locations and any other tidbits I can find. That is what I’ve attempted to do here with the children of William and Amelia Jones Tidwell. Some were done in great detail in past columns, especially those who married into the Westmoreland family. This happened more than just a couple of times.

We will recap the children beginning next week and give a little more detail on those we haven’t discussed at all.

Thank you again for all the e-mails and good wishes I’ve received over the past four months. Please feel free to write if you have anything to add about this family. I can be reached at jkilgore@thecitizen.com or JodieK444@aol.com.

Until next week, happy hunting!