Family Spotlights

The Flanigan Family

The Flanigan Family Reunion

The Levett Family

CONSTITUTIONAL CORNER: Levett famly has prominent position in Black History Month

Article written by Yolande Lovingood-Moore, law enforcement coordinator, community relations coordinator and public information officer for the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office.

Levett family legacy is visible black history in Rockdale County

The Lester Family - Roberta Collins

I finally found this newspaper article. I wanted to share with all my family and Facebook friends the history of the Lester Family. Believe it my late grandfather Edward Lester and his siblings owned 300 acres of land in Rockdale County. According to my aunt the late Juanita Clay the land was their security in 1886 . Seven girls and three boys owned the land and the land provided all their necessities. The land between Lake Rockaway and Rockbridge Road was purchased in 1890. We have a lot to be thankful for because of those trailblazers before us. The three Juanita Clay, Ralph Ellicott and Margaret Sim who are now resting from their labor are standing in front of Crawfordsville Baptist Church located on Lake Rockaway Rd. Oh and Lester Rd is named after my grandfather Edward Lester.

First Annual Lester Road Family Day.

The descendants of Edward and Henrietta Lester celebrated their First Annual Lester Road Family Day. Celebration was commemorated with Commissioner; Oz Nesbit presenting the family with a declaration which declares October 15th as Lester Road Day. The Lester Road Community has been a part of the Conyers/Rockdale community since the early 1940’s.

ROBERT LEE FAMILY —

This comes from Beverly Veal, nee Lee: Mr. Robert Thomas Lee was born in Rockdale County, Georgia, on December 13, 1922 to Mrs Lily Bates Lee and the late Mr. Thomas Lee. In 1941 Robert Lee married Naomi Darian Lee. In 1942 they had a child named Beverly Lee. During that time he started working at the mill in Milstead for about 3 years; then he was given a lot on Pleasant Circle by my mother's Granddaddy Mr. Richard Woods. He then started to build a house on that lot. He went to JP Carr school at night for veterans. He then decided to start building homes and also open a dry cleaner on Bryant Street. He never wanted to work a low salary job. He bid on jobs at the courthouse and poured concrete sidewalks on Milstead Avenue. He then got the job at Lithonia Lighting, pouring concrete. His family began to increase with Robert Jr. In 1950 he opened the dry cleaner with Mr. Howard Carr. In the same year he built the house across the street for Mr. Allen Wood. Audrey Lee was the last child. I am 10 years older than her. His work increased and he hired help. Mr. Kenneth Hall said he helped with his house. Mr. John Dardy and many more. The I .R S . started after him and he hired Mr. Ellis Woodall to keep records. After 16 years my mother divorced him; and he married Mary Bailey, the third grade teacher at J.P. Carr. He died January 29, 2000.

July 2, 2017

The Moores

MIGRATION STORY: The MOORES, etc. — People flocked to Harlem and Brooklyn and Queens in New York City, as did one of my great grandmothers, Carrie Allison Moore Williams, who had been born in 1871 in Louisiana or North Carolina. Her hometown was Statesville, N.C., until she and her two daughters moved to Atlanta around 1900. Her son, Norman Moore, was born there in 1902. Carrie left her children behind when she went North in the early 1900s. She did domestic work, as did many women — and men. She and her children were reunited as adults, when her two daughters settled in New York City. Their brother, my grandfather-to-be Norman Moore, went North with his growing family for a while, settling just across the Hudson River from New York City, in Newark, N.J. He had been a teacher in Covington, but worked as a night watchman at a zinc factory in Newark. My uncle Robert Moore was born there in 1929, joining his big sisters Marion (later Foster) and Minnie Ola (later Shipp). But the Moores, as did quite a few Southerners who did not find the North to their liking, returned to Georgia, settling in Conyers in the mid-1930s.

“Grandma Carrie,” as the Moore children called her, moved to Conyers to spend her last days with the family. She died in Conyers on May 4, 1942. I had a chance to get to know one of her daughters, my Aunt Marion Durant -- my grandfather’s sister -- when I went to New York City for school in 1976. By then she had retired from her job in the Youth Division of the New York Police Department. She had been a socialite and world traveler in her day, active in women’s clubs and the Episcopal Church and she took the game of bridge very seriously. She also liked betting on the horses. She was not a very good cook; and though, as a student, I was grateful when she prepared Sunday dinners for me, I was even more happy to go out to New York City restaurants with her and to be able to treat her to some good meals when I began working at the New York Times.

REMEMBERING WASHINGTON “WASH” ALLISON — On Dec. 1, 1910, the grandfather of Norman Moore Sr. died in Statesville, North Carolina, which is where we have deep roots. Wash was probably the son of Caleb Allison, who was enslaved by the William Allison family. According to records of Allison births that a midwife kept — even those of the black babies — Caleb was born in January 1822. Wash was born around 1841. When Wash married Jane Pharr on Jan. 18, 1870, he indicated that his parents were Caleb Allison and Esther Nichols. Jane’s parents were Alexander and Caroline “Carrie” Pharr. In our family, the name “Caroline” (shortened to “Carrie”) goes back at least to Caroline Pharr.

By 1900, Wash and Jane had had 10 children but four were dead. Those living were Caroline Isabella (“Carrie”), who became Norman’s mother; John T., Margaret (“Maggie”), Emma Bessie (later Morrison, then Holtsclaw); Pleas Washington, who was a musician in Detroit in the 1920s, and Berthia. Carrie and John had been born in Louisiana, according to a census. That's something I need to explore further.

Wash was a complicated man. I’ve found quite a few articles documenting his arrests for being a part of a theft ring that included his son-in-law, Samuel Albert Moore (Norman’s father) and Sam’s father, Lawson Chambers. A lot of freight apparently passed through the Statesville railroad depot. Wash, Sam, Lawson and others boosted merchandise from the train depot and sold it. They got caught and did time on the chain gang. Sam was in trouble quite often in his more active years for theft and other offenses. He was later known as a kind old man who loved tending his garden.

I also found an article in the Statesville Record and Landmark indicating Wash was paid a small sum by the town for “care of three children” in 1903.

Land that Wash and Janie Allison had apparently owned since Mar. 7, 1888, was put up for public auction in 1900, perhaps because of Wash Allison`s legal problems.

He and Janie were deceased by the time Norman and Ethel and their daughters Marion and Minnie moved to Statesville for a brief time in the 1920s. From there they moved to Newark, N.J., where their first son, Robert, was born. They ultimately decided to move back to Georgia, where their remaining children were born. Submitted by E.R. Shipp Facebook 12/1/19

OUR OWN MIGRATION SERIES — “The Great Migration was the movement of 6 million African-Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West that occurred between 1916 and 1970. Until 1910, more than 90 percent of the African-American population lived in the American South.” (Wikipedia) The photo I’m using here is from The Migration Series of the artist Jacob Lawrence.

History buffs may know about the Great Migration as a phenomenon. Many others know of its impact. Did you ever wonder about the aunts and uncles and cousins who sometimes visited from Cleveland and Chicago and Detroit and other seemingly exotic places? As of 1900, more than 2.8 million black people lived in Georgia — about a third of all blacks in the U.S. In the early 1900s, around World War I, as black people became more fed up with the limitations on their lives in the South, especially the rural South, and as more jobs opened up to support the war effort, thousands of black people from Georgia and elsewhere moved North and West. Another major wave occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, especially as World War II was getting underway. With each well-publicized lynching — like the one in Walton County in 1946 — more blacks fled Georgia, sometimes with the assistance of philanthropists and labor unions.

In recent decades, we’ve seen a reverse migration — folks moving back to Georgia and other parts of the South. But the Great Migration transformed the nation forever, changing the complexion and the culture of the cities. Thomas Dorsey, father of gospel music, went to Chicago from Villa Rica, Georgia. So did Elijah Poole of Sandersville, Georgia, who became the Honorable Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam. Jackie Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia. Cleveland? The first black mayor, Carl Stokes, whose brother was one of the first black Congressmen from Ohio, Louis Stokes? Their folks were from Georgia.

Some of our folks were in that number.

So on this page, let’s share some stories and photos of our kinfolks who went away and sometimes came back to visit (making us envious!) and sometimes came back to retire. And stories of our visits to them up North or out West. Let’s share.

Submitted by E.R. Shipp , May 16, 2018 to the Black Heritage of Rockdale Facebook page

The Adams home still stands on Malcolm Street in Conyers

Rev. John Henry Adams & Mrs. Laura E. Adams

HENRY McNEAL TURNER --Some of you have no doubt heard that name. The article I have posted here is about the renowned man whose influence stretched from Georgia to Africa to Canada. During the Civil War, he was appointed as the first black chaplain in the United States Colored Troops. Afterward, he was appointed to the Freedmen's Bureau in Georgia. He settled in Macon and was elected to the state legislature in 1868 during Reconstruction. He planted many A.M.E. churches in Georgia after the war. What makes him of particular interest here in Rockdale, or at least one of the reasons he is of interest, is that when he led a mission to establish the A.M.E. church in Africa, a member of his delegation was the Rev. John Henry Adams -- the husband of the teacher and churchwoman whose name is well-known to some of us, as it is/was to our parents and grandparents: Mrs. Laura E. Adams. Bishop Adams was considerably older than she. When they moved to Rockdale County from Eatonton in 1906, he built them a new house on Malcolm Street, a house I remember from my childhood. He was a trustee at Morris Brown College, where Bishop Turner was chancellor, until 1912. When he died sometime in 1915, Mrs. Adams became a 37-year-old widow with three young children. She taught in Rockdale County as early as 1910, according to the census taken that year. She taught at the Shady Grove Baptist Church school for a while. But she spent most of her teaching career in Milstead at the school at Mt. Olive Baptist Church, where, starting in 1919, she had charge of the children of black employees of Callaway Mills. By the 1939-40 school year, Mrs. Adams was teaching 46 students in seven grades, with an average daily attendance of about half that number. Back then, school took a back seat to the agricultural needs of the county. She retired when the school was closed, around 1949. Milstead's black children then attended the Bryant Street School in Conyers. Said to have a photographic memory, Mrs. Adams was largely self-taught. She had graduated from seventh grade, which was the highest grade offered to blacks in most of rural Georgia, but she read extensively and every summer she took courses at Atlanta University. She loved mathematics as well as poetry, and often recited poems at Rock Temple A.M.E. Church. She lived long enough to see her grandson, Rev. William R. Wilkes Jr., serve as pastor at Rock Temple from 1965-1967. Mrs. Adams died at the age of 103 on Feb. 10, 1981. I will write more on Mrs. Adams at a later time. I invite others to share their stories.

Would You Follow Your Pastor to Africa?

Submitted by E. R. Shipp, October 19, 2017 to the Black Heritage of Rockdale County Facebook page

Augustus Lett, Sr.

In my conversations with Mr. Augustus Lett, Sr. we talked about work life. As the cotton and farming began to play out in the early 60's, people started seeking other work opportunities. Mr. Lett had gone to work at Calloway Mills. When Lithonia Lightning came in around 1957-58, he went and tried to get on but was told that they could not hire him because he worked at Calloway Mills.The county had stipulated that Lithonia Lightning could not hire any of the mill workers; they needed to keep the mill going and knew that people would try to leave for better pay. He ended up going to work at Georgia Highway Express in 1958 as did a lot of others. My dad, Johnnie Shipp worked there; Raymond Carr, Sr., Horace Printup and many others from Conyers, Covington area. Johnnie Shipp retired in 1984 with 25 years of service and Mr. Lett retired in 1988 with 30 years of services. Horace went on to work for General Motors and retired from there. There were other industries such as C&D Batteries that opened June 1965; the Rockdale Citizen captured a picture of the first persons receiving the first checks and my uncle Laymon Taylor was among them. Lifetime Foam, Wil-Mac Containers were all early industries in the county. Do you remember other companies in the late 50's early 60's where blacks gained employment?

Please add the names of the companies and share the names of people that worked there.

Submitted by Norma Shipp, July 30, 2017 to the Black Heritage of Rockdale County Facebook page.

From Dolly Duffie: Her father was Willie Elliott Jr., the son of Willie Sr. and Katie Bell Carr Elliott, who lived for many years on Loyd Street next to J. P. Carr School. Her mother, Shirley, who is 77, is the oldest child of Sammy Ruth and Walter Eugene Cornell. She still lives in Conyers. The Elliott children are: Vickie (Ingram), Kimble (Gates), Denise (Pressley), Dolly (Duffy), Chunkey, Jackie (Johnson) and Donna. There are many grandchildren and great grandchildren as well.

OUR PEOPLE: GILES — Let’s explore who has a GILES connection. My roots go back to Henry Giles (see photo) and his wife Julia Hall Giles. They were born in the 1830s during slavery. They ended up in what became, in 1870, Rockdale County. One of their daughters, Maggie, was born around 1868. She married Lucius Holden in Newton County on July 29, 1886. The Holdens’ children included Catherine (later Bigby), Celia (later SHIPP), Lucius 2d and George. So, through Maggie, I'm connected to lots of Gileses and Holdens. What is your GILES story? (Don’t worry. We’re starting with these names. We’ll get around to others.) Submitted by E.R. Shipp to Black Heritage of Rockdale County Facebook page July 1, 2017

Franklins Celebrate 55th Wedding Anniversary

Franklins celebrate 55th wedding anniversary

Fathers Day.pdf

Rev. Aldren & Jean Sadler with Family

from June 17, 1999 in recognition of Father's Day.

Mother Shipp was one of the featured mothers for the Mother's day tribute that the Rockdale Citizen did. Story to be added.

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