Pelham Lady Goes to Her Reward - My Grandmother

As I was going through stacks of papers in my office, trying to separate writing from genealogy and personal information, I came across a copy of my grandmother's obituary in the Pelham Journal. She died in 1930. I believe this was copied by my cousin Peggy Ann Whitley when she and her mother, my aunt Mildred, went to Pelham and surrounding area researching our family many years ago.

If you are a family historian or if you are interested in genealogy as I am, finding an obituary can be very helpful for your records. I learned several things from this one.

Pelham Lady Goes to Her Reward

Mrs. Lula Robison, wife of W.H. Robison died suddenly at her home in East Pelham Saturday morning at ten o’clock.

Funeral services were held at the Hand Memorial Methodist Church Sunday afternoon at four o’clock with Rev. Guyton Fisher and Rev. C.C. Kiser in charge. Interment followed in Pelham cemetery. Mrs. Robison was widely known and loved throughout this section and surrounding county.

Her passing was a source of much sorrow.

She was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. Jones of Grady County and was borned on September 18, 1870.

She was married to William Robison of Cairo in 1887. Into this union were borned eight children. The oldest being H.A. Robison of Blakely, Ga., Mrs. J.M. Blitch of Cairo, Mrs. A.S. Blitch of Pelham, Ga., Mrs. A. G. Green of Clearwater Fla., D.L. Robison of Albany, Ga., W.R. Robison of Americus, Ga., Mrs. C.L. Council of Pelham, Ga., Mrs.  J.L. Whitle,(Whitley) of Pelham, Ga. She is mourned by a number of grandchildren, also five sisters and three brothers.

Card of Thanks

We wish to acknowledge with grateful appreciation the many expressions of sympathy and kindness shown us during the recent death of our darling wife and mother. Also the beautiful floral offerings.

May God bless each of you is our prayer.

W.H. Robison and Family

The above was copied from the Pelham Journal dated November 6, 1930

I copied the words just as they are on the page so borned is what was written. Although my mother had told me that Lula, her mother, died of a heart attack while sitting at the breakfast table, I did not know what day of the week it was. I did not know how widely known and loved she was by the community. I did not know that H.A. Robison, my uncle Avon, was living in Blakely GA at the time, nor did I know that Uncle Rudolph, W.R. Robison, lived in Americus, GA. When I knew these uncles they lived in Albany, GA where I lived. 

My cousin, Rob Robison, shared his genealogy records, which included this obit, with me when he came in May. I am so glad to have this in my records now. Thanks to Peggy Ann and to Rob I now have this writing about my grandmother who I was named for but never met. 

Mother told me about her father holding her hand and walking to church at Hand Memorial Methodist when she was a child. He was a Methodist and there was no other Methodist church in Pelham. In East Pelham, where she lived, there was a Baptist church which she attended often with her friend, Mary Ella Brock. Hand Memorial is named for J.L. Hand, the wealthy man from up north who came down south and built himself a town. The entire center of the town was a huge building, Hand Trading Company, which my father said carried everything anyone would need, from the cradle to the grave. My grandfather, William Henry Robison, was maintenance  man for all of Mr. Hands buildings including the houses where the workers at his cotton mill resided. Mother said her daddy was the best chimney builder anyone could find. That was a talent very much in demand back in those days. 

All of the Robison children moved away from Pelham once they married. The two Blitch families moved to Miami, Florida, the Green family moved to Clearwater, Florida.The others ended up in Albany, Georgia where I was born.  

Have you ever found some document about your family that you had never seen before?

Do you know much about your family history?

Another post you might like:
http://profilesandpedigrees.blogspot.com/2015/03/old-age-is-treasure-house-of-history.html

Councils, Poseys and Brocks connected by marriage

With several cousins some years ago, I compiled a history of John Cecil Council and his descendants for seven generations. We had hoped to publish this family history but some said there were errors in the family information given to us so the book was never published. I moved to North Carolina while this was in progress and was unable to meet with the others or to uncover the errors. I do have all the information we collected from members of John Cecil's family in my computer and will gladly share it with others who are working on this genealogy. I have not done family research in years but I hope someone in the Council family will want this information to further their own research.

John Cecil was born in 1833 in Alabama and died in 1910 in Florida. He is buried in the Council Family Cemetery in Wakulla County, Crawfordville, Florida. Both wives, Frances Delaura Posey and Nancy Missouri A. Smith are buried beside him. He had seven children by each wife and his last child was born when he was over seventy.

My grandfather, Tom, was the first born son in John Cecil's first family.
Tom married Sarah Brock who was called Sally, in 1878 in Florida. Sarah's parents died when she was very young. A wealthy couple wanted her but her half brother, Alphonso White, took her to live with an aunt who already had lots of kids and couldn't afford another. Sally lived the last part of her life, after her husband died, in Palmetto, Florida where several of her children resided. She is buried in Pelham, GA where her husband had been buried in the Pelham cemetery in 1911.