Family History
Jerry Taylor on tracing other people’s genealogies
WHEN JERRY TAYLOR was in the sixth grade, his teacher told his class, “You all had ancestors at Valley Forge, and you can find out about them. They’re not in the history books, but you can find out about them.”
That teacher at Hiawassee Elementary School, Kieffer Garrett, was speaking metaphorically, Taylor said. But he was hoping his students would be intrigued enough to at least think about George Washington at Valley Forge during the American Revolution. Maybe, just maybe, they were actually related to someone there.
Jerry Taylor, who became a teacher himself, took Mr. Garrett at his word. He went home and told his parents, “We’re going to Grandma Taylor’s this afternoon to find out about my ancestors that were at Valley Forge with George Washington.”
John and Helen Taylor humored their inquisitive son. They took him to town and stopped by the dime store to buy a notepad to record all the great stories his grandmother would tell him. Turns out, Grandmother Rosa Nicholson Taylor didn’t know of any ancestors who were at Valley Forge, but she told him as much as she could about the family.
Young Taylor wasn’t satisfied. Thanks to a friend, Alexander Burns, a genealogist who hired him to copy census records, he learned as a student how to find applications for Revolutionary War pensions. “If I could find someone in census records who was born before the Revolution, and if they were soldiers, they probably had a pension,” said Taylor, now in his sixties. “And Alexander Burns showed me where to look for who got pensions,” information available in archives in Washington, DC.
By the time he was fourteen, Taylor had tracked down eight ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. “And believe it or not,” he said, “one of them was John Peter Corn, who was actually at Valley Forge. So, my teacher was speaking metaphorically, and it came out that it really was. I made it turn out to be the truth.”
It was a warm Tuesday in early June in the mountains of Northeast Georgia, and Jerry Anthony Taylor was sitting at a reading table inside the Towns County Public Library in Hiawassee, a convenient place for an interview because it is next door to the courthouse, where Taylor spent countless hours researching the history of his county and its people. Following the interview, sure enough, he headed for the courthouse. After all, he is the official county historian.
Let’s get one thing clear about this man, a retired teacher after thirty-two years at Towns County High School. A lot of people are interested in genealogy and in the history of their region, but few of them are obsessed with studying heritage as Jerry Taylor is. Thirty years ago, years before Google and the Internet facilitated family research, Taylor, with help from Thomas Flanagan, a fellow teacher, spearheaded the production of a heritage book for Towns County, Georgia. Researching the original settlers back then was tremendously time-consuming. The county was established in 1856, so, naturally, he concentrated on the 1860 census.
Then someone challenged him. Taylor does not take challenges lightly. “What about those people who settled here before the county became Towns?” he was asked. “Don’t they count?” So Taylor is working on volume two of Hearthstones of Home, tracking down people who lived in the area from 1832 until 1856. “My goal,” he said, “is to have a tidbit on every settler from 1832 to the 1860 census.”
Taylor grew up on a chicken farm, first in Hog Creek Community and then in the Fodder Creek Community. “They say I was studious,” he said, “but I grew up country like everybody else.” But Taylor didn’t spend his time like everybody else. His mother worked in Hiawassee at an egg hatchery, and he usually rode home with her after school. Between the time classes ended and his mama’s quitting time at five o’clock, he could be found at the local library, when it was open, which wasn’t every day.
When school was out for the summer, his parents would take him to Atlanta to spend several weeks with an aunt and uncle. The uncle worked at the big Sears Building on Ponce de Leon Avenue, which served for decades as a warehouse facility as well as a retail store for Sears, Roebuck. At six o’clock in the morning, Taylor was at the Sears store. “I would find my way to the state archives and be waiting at the door, chomping at the bit, when they opened at nine o’clock.” He would walk from Sears to the capitol, where his uncle would pick him up after five o’clock. “When that uncle got tired of me,” he said, “I had another uncle at Forest Park,” near Atlanta.
After high school, it was no surprise that Taylor, an exemplary student, received a scholarship to attend nearby Young Harris College. After Young Harris, he attended the University of Georgia in Athens, where he majored in, not surprisingly, history. He attended UGA on a scholarship that was half grant, half loan. But if the recipient taught in certain areas in “poverty-stricken Appalachia,” as the program put it, the loan part was forgiven after seven years. Taylor’s was forgiven.
So, what kind of teacher was Jerry Taylor? Quilla Thomas-Bradley of Towns County, now a teacher herself, remembers well. In Taylor’s social studies class, he delighted in posting on a bulletin board the genealogies of several families of the county. He would put up four or five of these genealogies, all drawn, lined off, and written by hand, and invite students to see if they could find their names. Thomas-Bradley was interested in her own family tree, mainly because her mother, Jean Sosebee Thomas, was heavily into genealogy. But Taylor expanded her interest to include the whole county. “It was thrilling to students to see how we were all connected,” she said.
Taylor was also adviser to the Coed Y Club, a Christian group that Thomas-Bradley led as president for three years. Taylor was also a tour guide. “He would take us all over Northeast Georgia on field trips,” Thomas-Bradley said. He would escort students to Rock Eagle at Eatonton, Georgia, to different conferences, to singing or talent shows, you name it. And he took it upon himself to pick up students who lived in the Young Harris area so they could come, too. “I think maybe he had a Ford Granada,” Thomas-Bradley said, “and he’d cram eight or nine people into his car. You couldn’t do that today, of course.”
What was the purpose of the trips? “Well,” she said, “he wanted quality. He wanted upstanding citizens, and he wanted people to have more knowledge, period. He wanted us to see not just Towns County, but to be with other people and learn new things.”
After becoming a teacher, Thomas-Bradley was working in her classroom one day while her older daughter, Jeannie, then a fourth grader, was looking over a printout of several genealogies that Taylor had digitized as a favor to his former student. Examining the family trees, Jeannie learned just how tightly connected her family is to other families in the county.
Not only does Taylor know genealogies, he knows beaucoup stories from the county’s past. One of them from 1887 involves a man named James B. Goddard. Taylor doesn’t know much about him, but he knows this much: Goddard ran a tippling house on the square in Hiawassee, where he sold liquor by the drink. Thirsty folks would walk up to the window in the door and order. Goddard was often fined, Taylor said, for keeping his business open on the Sabbath.
One day, Goddard was walking down the road when he met Tilman Justice and a friend. The story goes that Justice was a moonshiner and that Goddard had turned him in. “The story in the court minutes,” Taylor said, “is that Tilman went up to Goddard, who immediately got down on his knees, held up his hands to pray, and said, ‘Lord, have mercy; don’t hurt me, Tilman.’ ” Justice shot the man in the face and beat him unmercifully with the stock of the gun.
“Tilman is the only person in Towns County who received a death sentence by hanging, and my grandmother was there,” Taylor said. “She was about eight. Everybody went to the hanging. Back then, capital punishment was to be a deterrent to crime. People got to see what happened to you if you were bad. So hangings were public spectacles. The amazing thing is that my great-grandparents took their eight-year-old daughter and put her up on the back of a wagon so she could see.” Fortunately, he said, someone fired a gun off in the distance and onlookers turned away just as Goddard was hanged. When they turned back around, it was all over.
This is just one of Taylor’s many stories about the county. “Jerry’s got so much of this stuff in his head, he doesn’t need to do tons of research,” said Debbie Phillips, manager of the library where the interview was held. “He’s such a unique person in how he can remember and know a person’s genealogy, and for several generations.”
Taylor has also formed some strong opinions about the importance of historical events, like how the Civil War affected education, for example. Before the war, he said, the penmanship of people in the county was excellent. But if you look at Southern court records a generation afterward, you can see how unimportant education had become. “They were scraping to get by,” said Taylor, “and going to school was not part of the scraping. So the education went down.”
But about the 1880s, he said, a concentrated effort was made to educate citizens once again. National church organizations started academies in the Northeast Georgia Mountains, and some of those academies are now colleges. People began going back to school to become qualified to do something: to be a teacher, a preacher, a doctor, a lawyer. But where would these people teach, preach, doctor, and do their lawyering? They would leave the mountains for better opportunities elsewhere.
“By the 1920s,” he said, “a brain drain had been created in the area. Even if you weren’t educated, you still wanted to get out because there was nothing to make a living at.” People went to Gainesville, Georgia, to work at textile mills, or to Asheville, North Carolina, or to Detroit, Michigan, or to Canton, Ohio. Taylor’s great-grandfather, Esco Burch, was one of them. After putting his crops by in the summer, he would go to Murphy, North Carolina, get a train ticket for twenty-nine dollars, and go to Canton, Ohio, to work in a factory.
Taylor’s aunt, Pauline Taylor Funderburk, went to Hiawassee Academy and got a teacher’s certificate. After teaching at a three-month school, she used her pay to buy a train ticket to Charlotte, North Carolina. “She got her a job and never came back,” he said. “That Hiawassee Academy was her ticket out of here to a better life.”
Fortunately, by 1940, Taylor said, the level of education in Hiawassee was astoundingly good. “We looked like a little academic town.” Public high school education found a home in the mountains. In Towns County, the county bought a school building started by a church home mission board and turned it into a public high school.
Jerry Taylor is a product of that improved education system, and he stayed in Towns County to continue the trend. Unfortunately, he said, penmanship again is being kicked to the side, this time in favor of computer training. “This generation is growing up and they won’t be able to read cursive. It’ll be akin to something like hieroglyphics in Egypt. If it’s not spit out of a computer, they can’t read it.”
Taylor occupies a bully pulpit for his opinions on education. He’s a member of the county’s board of education. And even school boards could stand some improvements, he said. Board members should have to meet certain qualifications before they can seek election. If we’re demanding that students pass statewide tests every year, shouldn’t we demand that school policy makers meet some requirements, too?
PLATE 106 Taylor often is asked to play at concerts and churches.
His days as a teacher may be over, but Taylor stays busy with his research, his reed organs, his concerts, and his speaking engagements. “He gets around,” said Towns County Commissioner Bill Kendall, who has known Taylor since he was a high school student. “I see him at the courthouse, at historical society meetings, and I attended a meeting at a church in Hayesville, North Carolina, and he was a piano soloist.”
Music is a big part of Taylor’s life. “Being a Taylor,” he said, “music is supposed to be in your blood. Growing up, all I heard was, ‘Oh, you’re Jeremiah Taylor’s grandson. He was a great singer.’ ” And Jerry Taylor has lived up to everyone’s expectations. He was fascinated by the pump organ, an old Sears, Roebuck model, he saw in his grandmother’s house, and took music lessons through high school and college. Taylor is called on occasionally to give concerts, and he’s given tours of the thirty-one reed organs that occupy their own room at the Taylor home.
You may be wondering what happened to John Peter Corn, the Taylor ancestor who was traced to Valley Forge Camp during the Revolutionary War.
PLATE 107 Jerry Taylor’s loft at his home contains thirty-one reed organs.
Corn, according to family lore, was detailed one day to get apples for the Army. And when he came to a certain farm, he spotted a pretty young girl and fell madly in love with her right there in the orchard. After the war, he went back and married the apple of his eye and moved to Hendersonville, North Carolina. By the next generation, Native Americans had been moved out of Northeast Georgia, and some of Corn’s sons moved to what became Towns County. The names of Corn’s relatives have been found in a family Bible. John Peter Corn died in the 1840s and received a military funeral. He was eighty-something years old. It’s stories like this one that keep Jerry Taylor digging into records at the courthouse, records in state and federal archives, and notations in family Bibles. They’re what keep him, along with an assistant, Jason Edwards, working on volume two of Hearthstones of Home.
“Who knows?” he said. “After I get through volume two, I may get on a roll and pump out a bunch more.”
No one in Towns County would be surprised at all.