PDA

View Full Version : First Lady's White Ancestors



shaarona
12-07-2013, 08:38 AM
The first link is the NYT and contains some photos and interesting side history.


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/22/us/first-lady-family-q-and-a.html?_r=0#/#1


Melvinia was bequeathed in a will from her South Carolina owner to a relatively prosperous Clayton County farm family headed by Henry Shields in 1850 when she was about six years old. The Shieldses grew cotton, corn and other staples, and owned two other slaves. In 1860, at the dawn of the Civil War, Melvinia gave birth to her first child, Dolphus, the father being the Shields’s oldest son Charles (according to DNA research revealed in the book), a white man. Melvinia remained with the Shields family through the Civil War.

Melvinia was living on the farm near Jonesboro during the epic Battle of Jonesboro August 31-September 1, 1864, that sealed the fate of Atlanta. The Shields’s farm was in audible distance of the fighting of this final battle of the Atlanta Campaign that would reassure the reelection of Abraham Lincoln.

According to the 1870 census, Melvinia was employed as a farm laborer, washwoman, maid, and was the mother of four children, three of whom were listed as mulatto. She continued to live on the Clayton County farm of Charles Shields until the end of the 19th century.

Melvinia next appears in the census living in Kingston, Bartow County, Georgia, under her married name Mattie McGruder.

Employed as a midwife, she shared a home with her adult children and four grandchildren. According to the late Miss Ruth Applin of Kingston, who not only knew Melvinia but married her grandson Emory, “Mattie McGruder [was] a loving, spiritual woman seen often with her bible and singing hymns.” Melvinia died at the age of 94 and is buried in the churchyard at Queen Chapel Methodist Church in Kingston.

http://www.gacivilwar.org/story/melvinia-shields