Looking Back Through Time Today...

 I pursue a little family genealogy from time to time. It does not go to the extent a few friends and relatives efforts do where they travel and look up old records in court houses and graves in cemeteries. It's just a rainy day type thing that I do using ancestory.com when I can't play outside. Maybe one day when I can't play outside so well at all I'll check out the genealogy room at my local library which will probably have a staggering amount of info on my people who started coming to the area in the late 1830s and 40s. 

One particular person I have been curious about is someone who never made it to Angelia County. His name is Aqullia Nerren. I think I have picked up some vibe, maybe it's from the unusual name or the sparse information I have but it's cased me to look a bit further. I can't really call it all a proud history because it involves my people owning people and living in infamous places but it is an interesting history.  

Aquilla was my 4th great-grandfather. He was born in 1780 in Abbeville South Carolina. and passed away in Lafayette County, Mississippi in 1848 and was a slave owner. This is all I knew at one point so to flesh him out a bit I looked up Abbeville County. Before his birth Indian Treaties had been signed there and the native people had moved on. By the Civil War the area was a hot bed of succession activity. From 1882 to 1919 there were nine documented lynching's in the county. It's a poor county with median family income reported in 2010 at $33, 143. Lafayette County, Mississippi is thought to be the model for William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County which was where he set his famous gothic southern novels.  

Here is an online photo of someone's research into Aquilla with more details you can read for yourself.  

Aquilla was my 4th great grand father. His was John, who made it to Angelina County in 1848 with his family in a covered wagon and settled at Marion's Ferry running a ferry until his murder in 1850. If you read the document you will find mention of a slave, Solomon. You probably can't look up Solomon's genealogy very well since he was willed like property by John to youngest son George Nerren but apparently was so instrumental in the ferry which crossed to Nacogdoches that after the Civil War it became know as "Sol's Ferry." This is interesting because once I was fishing with a friend on the Attoyac River branch of Lake Sam Rayburn and he showed me an unofficial campground in the woods where old hairy county people came to camp and fish and he called it "Sol Bridge." I don't know if there is a connection.     

John was my 3rd great grandfather. His son George who owned Solomon was born in Yalobuscha County Mississippi in 1845, and passed in Angelina county in 1900. George had two sons B.F. Nerren who figures in the history of Angelina as a former sheriff and my great great grandfather John Quiller Nerren, the father of my grandmother Gladys Nerren Wallace. Quiller as they called him was born in Lufkin in 1869 and passed away. in 1946 in Granny's old house on Jack Street in Lufkin. I have a picture of Quiller around here somewhere but I can't find it. 

Let's see if I can get this right:

Aquilla was married to "Emilly" "Emelia" or Emily Learwood.

John Nerren was married to Elizabeth Mooney

George Nerren was married to Nancy Jane Needham and "had a relationship" which produced children with Julia Ridgway.

Quiller Nerren was married Aliza Lydia Albritton and that's why all Albritton's in Angelina County are related to me. 

There's a lot to learn from this history here. It's how we got here and it's how we move on. More information will come to light and we will adapt and add it to the record. As Faulkner said, "The past is not dead. It's not even past."  

Here's photo of Granny with my dad and uncles. left to right Sammy, Leonard, Bill, Don, Granny and my dad, Gene.