In spite of the muddy winter skies, another baby was sweet tonic for the Floyd family. The birth lifted their spirits. The entire household was rejuvenated. The baby made it seem as if spring had reached Georgia early.
Charles Arthur’s parents—Walter Lee Floyd and Mamie Helena Echols Floyd—were quietly proud and wasted no time in summoning relatives and friends to see their newborn son. Following church services on the first Sunday after the infant’s birth, wagons and buggies surrounded the Floyd’s residence. The women fussed around the baby and exchanged stories. Out behind the house where Walter Floyd kept his prized hounds, the men stayed busy with their tobacco, a jug of homemade sipping whiskey, and gossip of their own. Guests brought fruit pies, spice cakes, and pots brimming with venison stew. There were plenty of gifts and hand-me-down clothes for the baby.
Months before he was born, Mamie and Walter, anticipating another boy, had chosen their son’s names. Charles was from the Anglo-Saxon ceorl and the English churl, meaning “manly, strong,” or, literally, “full-grown,” and Arthur from the Gaelic art, meaning “a rock,” or from the Celtic artos, meaning “a bear.” His first name was for his paternal grandfather, Charles Murphy Floyd; his middle name was the same as his mother’s oldest brother, Arthur Echols.
From the beginning, almost everyone called the boy Charley.
He was Walter and Mamie’s second son and fourth child. Carl Bradley was their eldest. He had been followed by a pair of daughters, Ruth and then Ruby Mae. All the children were born at predictable two-year intervals at the Floyd’s home in Bartow County, not far from the town of Adairsville.
This branch of the Floyd family had lived in the Georgia hill country for seventy-five years. Most of their genealogy was preserved through oral history that was passed around the supper table along with the bowls of field peas and collard greens and platters of fried chicken and pork chops. Some of the family’s bloodlines, however, were also inked in Bibles or scribbled on paper and handed down to offspring. The Floyds seemed to have a good sense of who they were and who they had been.
They proudly traced their name and lineage back more than three centuries to Wales, the western peninsula of Great Britain, bounded by St. George’s Channel on the west, which separates it from Ireland, and Bristol Channel on the south. Among those early inhabitants who roamed that rugged highland country, they claimed kinship to Sir John Floyd, a sixteenth-century writer of note and lecturer with the Society of Jesus who had battled the Spanish Armada as a youth and had been knighted by Queen Elizabeth I. The Floyds also counted a missionary, as well as boat builders and surveyors in their family tree. Most of the Floyds, in fact, had been Welsh farmers, tillers of the soil who left the country that became known not only for its tradition of poetry but also its contrast of coalfields and castles. In the early seventeenth century, they had sailed to America with some of the first waves of colonists.
Family records spoke of Floyds coming in 1619 to Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World, founded on the James River in 1607. They arrived at the Virginia colony aboard the Rova, a ship they had helped build. That same year, ninety single women were sent to the colony from London, while twenty blacks were imported as indentured servants rather than slaves. Presumably, the young women immigrants became wives of stalwart colonists, including some of the Floyds.
Although the family history is at best sketchy, anecdotes of Floyd ancestors include mention of Walter Floyd, the owner of four hundred acres of property in the Virginia colony in the mid-1600s; Nathaniel Floyd, who in 1632 maintained eight hundred acres on the Isle of Wight, the diamond-shaped island off the central southern coast of England; and Richard Floyd, a 1653 visitor to Jamestown before he established himself at Long Island, New York, when the English gained control of the island from the Dutch. There were also family stories, with no specific dates attached to them, concerning four Floyd brothers—William and Frederick, early settlers in Accomack County, Virginia; John, about whom it was said, “he went north, lost to family”; and Charles, who married a wealthy woman and settled in Georgia.
The family also claimed kinship to William Floyd, an American patriot and signer of the Declaration of Independence, who was described as “a practical, firm, unpolished man who enjoyed hard work.” He was apparently distantly related to the Floyds of Georgia. What is known about this particular Floyd is that he was born December 17, 1734, in Brookhaven, Long Island, New York, the son of Nicoll and Tabitha Floyd. William’s parents were wealthy, and as a young man, he led the life of landed gentry on Long Island. He later became a civic and military leader, and by the outbreak of the American Revolution, he was a major general in the Suffolk County Regiment of the New York militia. Floyd fought for the patriots against the British and served competently, but without distinction, as a member of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1777 and again from 1778 to 1783.
In 1776, Floyd was the first New York delegate to sign the Declaration of Independence. That same year, the British seized Floyd’s farm as rebel property. Throughout the rest of the war, he lived solely on his congressional pay while his family sought refuge in Connecticut. After independence from Britain was won, Floyd sat in the first U.S. Congress, ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of New York, and served as a New York state senator and a presidential elector. He died in 1821, and was buried at Westerville, New York.
It is doubtful that any of the Floyds from the Georgia hills ever stood over William Floyd’s grave to pay their respects. Nonetheless, they always savored being able to say—without a hint of smugness—that they believed they were related to one of the country’s first genuine mavericks. There would be others.
The Floyd family chronicle, largely based on hearsay and lore of Welsh pioneers, left a lasting impression on young Charley Floyd and remained one of his most vivid childhood memories. Listening to his older relatives relay the litany of family stories that retraced the Floyds’ movements through Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Georgia—including tales of kinfolk who had been killed by Indians and others who had eaten bear steak for breakfast—became the farm boy’s favorite evening and Sabbath pastime. He particularly savored the stories about Georgia, his birthplace, a state with a history as rich as the sorghum he poured over his biscuits.