Benjamin and Julia Caldwell were parents, grandparents and great-grandparents to a host of people, first in Pleasant Grove, Alabama, then spread all over the United States. This web site is about their families, both ancestors and descendants: over 10,000 relatives, by blood and marriage, including Wheelers, Israels, Nicholsons, Smiths, Churches, Jones, Looneys and Paynes. I can tell you how they are related, who most of them married, where they lived. Sometimes, I have a story or two about them. The most amazing finds were John Alden, Priscilla Mullins and Thomas Graves. The most interesting finds were the little stories included here and there.
The picture is a pansy from my mother's garden, a flower my granny, Ruby Caldwell Smith, taught us all to love and appreciate. Children could always pick the pansies, even when they had to leave the other flowers alone. It is a simple symbol of the ties that bind us: we are children of children, part of the continuum of our families and America's history.
This is the house where Ben and Julie Caldwell lived in Apex. My mother has wonderful memories of this house, including the fact that all the doorknobs were low enough for the children to reach them. She remembers sleeping on the porch, in the house, in her house next door, always with her grandmother, her cousins, her parents around. When she thinks about growing up in Alabama, it all centers around this place. My mother and her family actually lived in another house on the same property, but Granny and Popa's house was where it all happened for her. This house still stands in Pleasant Grove, but has some changes.
Getting Started
Like many amateur genealogists, I became interested at a family reunion. I noticed that half the people in the room had the same nose and chin and started thinking about the connections. (I guess hobbies have started on less.) I started with a family tree done by my mother’s cousin in the 1990s and expanded that with the wealth of information available through the internet today. I didn’t live near the Caldwells while I was growing up, except for my Granny Rube. I met her mother and sisters as they visited her. I’ve come to know the family through this research. I’ve talked to my mom and my uncle and their cousins and enjoyed all the story-telling. I’ve come to know the Church sisters as if they were my contemporaries and wish I could talk to them about the choices they made. I’ve come to understand the paths settlers followed through the United States and see the landscape of the Eastern states differently, as I imagine the wagon trains following the landmarks of the Piedmont. I see Pilot Mountain in North Carolina as a pointer south and west, not just the namesake for a town in the Andy Griffith show. Our families were adventurers. They sought out new land and new fortune. They were farmers and ministers who sometimes had other careers and sometimes didn’t. They were carpenters and men who worked for the mining company. They were devoted to family; this is clear in the way they moved together across hundreds of years and hundreds of miles, lived near each other, shared their fortunes.
A Rich History
I especially appreciate the deprivations and victories of those who settled the United States. My mother tells me that her grandmother told her that women went crazy in the dust bowl of Oklahoma in the beginning of the twentieth century. The constant howling of the wind drove them nuts. Before I began this research, I knew that was a hard time in our history, but now I can imagine women like myself and the suffering they encountered. I see members of the family traveling here and there in search of good fortune, sometimes staying in a distant state and sometimes returning home. I see census lists where the neighborhood looks like old home week, with grandparents, siblings, spouses and children all living within walking distance of each other. I see families connected over hundreds of years, across oceans and mountains. It’s amazing what you find in dry history! I even found a very distant relative who is the absolute spitting image of my brother. David R. Caldwell, whoever he was, has a face that lives today in southwestern Virginia. My eyes and forehead reflect Julia Caldwell, my great-grandmother, to an amazing degree.
My brother and I stood on land where our ancestors lived in 1779; we both felt an amazing, strong connection to the land. I’ve visited cemeteries and felt the tides of history. A rabbi pointed me to writings about the Israels in central Virginia in the 1700s, answering my email almost as quickly as I sent it. My mother connected the family to the stories of the camps on the Warrior River in Fried Green Tomatoes. In my research, I found that our Wheeler family in America is first documented in Maryland, just about 45 minutes from my current home. I also found that the places I have loved in my travels are the places where my family has lived. It is almost as if their experiences flow down through history and fill my bones. I wish I could adequately explain this feeling.
Enough philosophy! I’ll be posting the family trees, photos and stories as quickly as I can. Visit often. Uncle Jack reads this and tells me some more stories and I include those too. I hope that all of you who read this will send me a story as well. Some of this is well-researched and some is not. I’ve tried to note both absolute fact, where I have seen an original record, and supposition, so you can tell the difference.
I've added a date at the bottom of the page, so you will know whether the site is updated since you last visited.
Rae
