RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 24, 2014
KINSEARCHING
by
Marleta Childs
P. O. Box 6825
LUBBOCK, TX 79493-6825
[email protected]
On 12 and 13 September 2014, the East Texas Genealogical Society (ETGS) will hold a workshop and seminar in the First Assembly of God Fellowship Hall in Tyler, Texas. Featured speaker will be Lisa Louise Cooke. On the night of the 12th, she will host a workshop to show attendees the possibilities that Google Earth offers. During the all-day seminar on the 13th, she will discuss Google search strategies for common names, ways to enhance research with old maps, how to utilize newspapers in your search, and how to work on a genealogical “cold case.”
Costs per person will be $10.00 for the workshop and $40.00 for the seminar. Checks, payable to the society, may be mailed to P. O. Box 6967, Tyler, Texas 75711-6967. For more details, write to the society or get in touch with Scott Fitzgerald at 903-539-5572 (e-mail [email protected]).
Do you have a Whitten line that claims roots in the South? If the answer is “yes,” you may find helpful information in TWO SONS OF CHARLES WHITTEN by William B. Moore, Jr.
Moore begins his volume with a brief synopsis of both the known and the speculative background of Charles Whitten, the earliest proven progenitor of his particular branch of the family. Born about 1736 and a pewter caster by trade, he and his wife, Nancy Smith, moved about 1784 from Virginia to Spartanburg District, South Carolina, where Charles died about 1798.
Although the couple may have had several children, only two sons can be positively identified: John, born in 1762, and Charles, Jr., born in 1769. They and their wives were born in Virginia. Both men married daughters of Revolutionary War veteran, James Reagan, and his first wife, Elizabeth Hayes. The two families traveled together on the move to South Carolina.
Due to the double Whitten-Reagan marriages, Moore furnishes data concerning the lineage of the Reagans, beginning with their immigrant ancestor, James Reagan, who probably sailed from Ireland to Charles County, Maryland, in 1679. (In later generations, some of James’s descendants moved to Tennessee. There, they married into the Cannon and Tunnell families before settling in such East Texas counties as Cherokee, Nacogdoches, and Rusk, where they still have numerous descendants today.)
As the title implies, however, most of the book concerns the family and descendants of Charles and Nancy Whitten’s known sons, John and Charles, Jr. Moore follows the descent of many of their offspring down to the late twentieth century. Needless to say, the number of their descendants runs into the thousands.
In his foreword, Moore states that he tried to discover the roles the Whittens and their related lines played in the settlement of lands as they moved westward across the South. To help accomplish his goal, he includes some background on certain historical events and augments the narrative with transcriptions of family letters and some church records.
The last few pages of the work supply information on some of the Whitten and Reagan descendants who became pioneers in Texas. A few arrived before the defeat of Santa Anna at San Jacinto in 1836, while others migrated to the Lone Star State in the late nineteenth century. Just a few of the counties in which they settled were Bell, Ellis, Houston, Lamar, Madison, and Wharton.
Like many families, relatives are now scattered throughout Texas as well as other parts of the U. S., including the West Coast. Therefore, many genealogists may find material useful in their research in TWO SONS OF CHARLES WHITTEN.
The 300-page publication has soft covers, a foreword, and a full-name index. Priced at $36.00, it may be purchased by check, money order, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express from Heritage Books, Inc., 5810 Ruatan Street, Berwyn Heights, Maryland 20740. For phone orders, call toll free 1-800-876-6103; fax 410-558-6574; e-mail [email protected]; website www.HeritageBooks.com). To the price of the book, buyers should add the cost for shipping charges. For U. S. postal mail, the cost is $7.00 for one book and $2.50 for each additional copy.