Bio – Gough Family Genealogy

February 20, 2022

William Davis bio and map

I’m plugging away at a family profile / biography of William Davis and his wife, Farsina Brewster and am about halfway there. This is part of my broader goal of doing family profiles through all my great-great-grandparents, including reviewing all the documentation and sourcing, looking at the gaps, trying to fill those gaps, and then crafting a story about their lives to help introduce them to my extended family and to more distant relatives I’ve never even met.

This bio includes another map, this one of the civil district lines in Morgan County, where they lived, in order to figure out what their neighborhoods were and how they might have met in the first place. It was interesting and challenging to try to place their land on a map, since Morgan County surveyors didn’t seem to include precise descriptions and distances in their survey calls, making it very hard to know exactly who their neighbors were and what the shape of their land was. So a couple of these locations (Zeke Cochran and Ransom Davis, in particular) are estimates based on other fragments of information from other sources.

I’ll finish the Davis-Brewster profile by the end of this week.

October 27, 2021November 12, 2021

Bio of Lula Branham Rowland

Lula Kathryn Branham was the second of Jesse Powers Branham and Laura Ann Thrasher’s three daughters and their fourth child. She was born on 13 January 1900 in Clinton County, Kentucky, and died 73 years later in Cumberland County, Tennessee. (1) This short bio is a continuing work in progress, with some research still to do, so it will be updated from time to time. (For more details on the family, please see the Harry Rowland and Lula Branham family page.)

Lula was born probably at the family’s farmhouse near the village of Shipley, five miles southwest from Albany, Clinton County’s county seat and its largest town, with 234 residents. (2) Six years later, Lula entered first grade at the Willen School, a one-room schoolhouse in Shipley on what is now Willen School Road. The caption on a 1906 photo of the school’s student body published in the local newspaper indicates that several of Lula’s siblings and cousins also attended in various different grades. (3)

October 20, 2021November 14, 2021

Bio of John Woods Rowland

John Woods Rowland was the third son and seventh child of William M. Rowland and Elizabeth C. Brown, who lived in Rutherford County their entire lives. John was born in 1859 in the rural southwest corner of the county, not far from the village of Rockvale. (1) During his long lifetime, he experienced the upheavals caused by three wars and two national financial collapses by the time he died in 1946 in the town of Harriman in eastern Tennessee’s Roane County. (2)

As a child, John experienced the hardships of the Civil War first-hand. In 1862, Union and Confederate battle lines moved across the county several times before the Union finally defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Stones River (31 December 1862-2 January 1863) and garrisoned a military force at the county seat of Murfreesboro.