Making My Nice List

52Ancestors Week 51—Nice

Making My Nice List 

By Myra Vanderpool Gormley © 2018 

It’s nice to be related to someone famous or rich (or both) and it’s nice to find cousins who share their years of research with you. But at the top of my “nice” list are two cousins I have never met personally. 

My maternal grandma use to remind me (jokingly) to be proud because I was a Peacock — a descendant of the Peacocks of Atlanta, in fact. Well, that didn’t mean much to me as a kid on a farm in Oklahoma. Even years later when I began to explore my ancestry seriously, my tendency was to brush aside the family legends about any purportedly rich or illustrious lines, and try to focus on just the facts. 

However, my granny knew what she was talking about — her mother-in-law — Elizabeth (Connally) Fricks, a widow, lived with her son and his wife (my granny) for many years. And Elizabeth (Connally) Fricks was a descendant of Louis Peacock, an early Atlanta-area pioneer. The details about the Peacock-Connally-Fricks connections I did not learn overnight, or by clicking on an online tree, or figure it all out in a weekend, but eventually I discovered that my great-granny was the only child of Elizabeth Jane (called Jane) Peacock who married “Big Charles” Connally at the tender age of 15 — much younger than my other female ancestors. In 1849, my great-granny was born in Atlanta — and her mother — Elizabeth Jane (Peacock) Connally died in 1852 at the tender age of 22 — the mother of only the one known child. 

I has no pictures of Elizabeth Jane Peacock (1830-1852) or any of her husband, Charles William “Big Charles” Connally (1817-1886), but fate smiled on me. One of my nice cousins (and a double cousin at that) shared with me some pictures of her ancestors — Thomas Whipple Connally (1809-1884) and Temperance Arnold Peacock (1818-1896). Thomas Whipple Connally is an older brother of my “Big Charles” and Temperance is an older sister of my Elizabeth Jane Peacock. 

Thomas Whipple Connally and Temperance Arnold Peacock

How nice is that? 

Another cousin, while cleaning out the attic, found a treasure that had been kept in his family for many generations. It was the 1800 Bible of a couple who married that year — my ancestors — Isaac Awtrey and Araminta Bankston. 

This super nice cousin of mine scanned the images and shared with us. Most of us had been researching for years, tracing the descendants of this couple but dead-ended at proving their parents. The Bible provided the date of marriage and the names of fathers of the couple, plus additional genealogical material on their children and more.

 It doesn’t getting any nicer than this.