
My mother was only 18 months old when her father, Charles Dick, died - leaving a pregnant wife and seven little children. As a child, Ieula Ann Dick never knew her paternal relatives, but she was told her Grandfather Dick had been the "first sheriff of Clay County, Alabama." I am told her Grandfather Dick's picture is still on the wall of the Clay County Courthouse.
Mama's young father had gone hunting late on a cold Christmas Day. He became very ill with a cold that turned into pneumonia and proved fatal for Charles and for many others in that year.
Soon after her father's untimely death, her maternal grandfather, Bogan Mask, moved his daughter, Elizabeth, and her children from Clay County Alabama to a small house on his large farm in Inman, Georgia. Inman was a farming community in Fayette County, Georgia, where the grieving widow, Elizabeth, gave birth to her eight child, a son. I do not know how Charles Dick in Clay County Alabama met Elixabeth Mask in Inman Georgia? But apparently Bogan Mask thought Charles Dick worthy to marry his oldest daughter?
Mama loved her Grandfather Mask who apparently tried to be a father to his oldest daughter's fatherless children. He was hard working and prosperous for the times - a farmer and a Methodist preacher. Bogan Mask also is credited with beginning Ebenezer Methodist Church in Fayette County and Friendship Methodist Church in Clayton County.
Aunt Cora, Eula's (my mother) older sister thought Elizabeth and her eight little children were overlooked often by their more prosperous relatives. But Mama said her mother was aware of her dependance and was timid about making her father aware of their needs.
My mother said she remembered the first pair of shoes she ever had. She told me how one time when her mother mentioned her feet were cold, she got down at the foot of the bed to rub her mother's feet until they were warm. Apparently the younger children were sleeping with their mother.
(My mother, whose IQ was at least as high as mine had to stop her schooling after about ninth grade. She revered her mother and the remembrance of he last time she saw her mother was a tramatic event in her life. Her mother had visited my parents and their children on their farm in Rockdale county. When Grandma Dick left, Mama stood in the road and watched Grandma as she drove her "Horse and Buggy" down the long dusty road out of her sight. A few months later Mama got word her mother was dying. Mama took a train to go to her mother in Griffin, Georgia but when she got there her mother had already died. Never again would Mama watch anyone out of sight. She would kiss us goodbye at the door and go back inside before we left in our car.)
Mama grew up to marry Wilson Baird when she was 18. Wilson was , according to Eula , "a young over 40. " Mama adored him and resented any inference that she married an "old man." I remember once visiting on our front porch with a neighbor lady gossip who told about a girl marrying an older man, she turned to Mama and said, "did you marry and old man?" Mama said quicky, "No, I did not." Mama was not a gossip. She talked about ideas (politics and religion and family history) and not people.
Wilson was the youngest son of William and Mary Baird. William had served as an officer in the Confederate Army and was wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness. His older sister's husband had been killed while serving in the Confederate Army, leaving his wife with a child to raise.
My understanding it that Wilson Baird, my Papa stayed on the farm to help his mother and widowed sister take care of his niece, and so waited until after age of 40 to marry.
I am the youngest of Wilson and Ieula's 11 children, nine of whom survived into adulthood.
Mama told me a little about the school she attended. As was typical in the South, this bright little girl went to school only too briefly in the war-torn South where many of the schools and houses had been torched as General Sherman and his Army moved through the Southland "all the way to the Sea."

Mama told me about Professor Culpepper who taught her though all the arithmetic books and into much of algebra in the little one room schoolhouse near Inman before, all too soon, she had to leave school to work in the fields and on the farm.
School was a luxury few in the South could afford.
When I asked Mama what grade she completed, she told me they did not have grade levels then (1890's) as we then had when i was in school (early 1930's). However, her formal education was probably somewhat equal to a ninth grade education.
Strangely, this was more education than many of the women in our neighborhood had at the time.

Mama revered Professor Culpepper and told me how he took time to teach algebra to her in that one room schoolhouse. Mama was also glad to tell me, in a world divided by class as well as race and gender, her father and her mother's family "came from good stock." They valued education for the girls as well as the boys.

My cousin S.J. Overstreet recently sent me this 1904 picture of the one room Inman Schoolhouse in Fayette County Georgia. Dr. Culpepper is shown on the back row. My mother was 19 in 1904 and had long since had to drop out of school and had married.
When I think of how valuable family history is to me, I know the need for all of America's children to hear the unique history of America at a time of world wide slavery and later illiteracy, class divisions and racial segregation.
We need to see how we did overcome many of these problems and not continue down the road to bitterness and political division of class and ethnicity and also not continue the destruction of our hard won life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.