I just received a package of photos today from a distant Pryor cousin in Texas. How distant? She’s a grand-daughter of my great-grandmother’s sister. Yikes, that’s pretty distant! She was nice enough, and trusting enough, to send me a treasure trove of photos to scan. It’s wild! There are 6 to 8 tin photos of from the 1870’s… photos of the daughter’s of Allen L. Pryor of Gallatin, TN and some unidentified people. I’m scanning them and sending these back to her. My plan is to get them up on the TN Pryor website so we can see who can be identified. They’ve already made the rounds (as photocopies) between several Pryor researchers, so many of them are now tentatively idenitified. Several of the photos are of whole family groups around 1895, shortly before they left Sumner County for Farmersville, TX.
Let the identity game begin! Who are these folks?
(02/22/07) ANSWER… This is probably Ann Eliza Pryor born 1846 to Allen L. Pryor of Sumner County, TN. Her husband was Joshua Anderson Simmons. They lived in TN and in Collin County, TX, and later in Cotton County, OK.
Monthly Archives: February 2007
Curiosity got the better of me. I ordered the Civil War Pension file for Emsley Pryor (despite the NARA having him indexed as Einsley). There are still several Pryor families in AR and MO whose lineage has not been uncovered. I had hoped to figure out if Emsley, James and Samuel Pryor (father of John Phillip Souza trombonist Arthur Pryor) were related. No such luck!Emsley Pryor applied for and received an invalid’s pension. He served in the Union Army as a bugler. Perhaps this bugling career means he was from the line of other musical Pryors! His physical description was aged 55, 6 feet, dark complexion, dark hair, dark eyes. He signed the pension application. Since he wasn’t on the 1850 nor the 1860 Census I’ve wondered if perhaps he was African-American.The pension file has the names and dates of births of his minor children at the time of his death on 8 Jul 1889.
Frank Stewart Pryor 7/23/1875
Frederick Rogers Pryor 5/23/1877
Pearl Self Pryor 9/7/1880
Ruby Hammond Pryor 12/23/1882
I’ve been helping out a friend who discovered she is related to Dr. James McCune Smith (www.jamesmccunesmith.com). Smith was the first African American to receive a degree in Medicine and was as prominent in the anti-slavery movement as his contemporary Frederick Douglass. The relationship to this historic leader was just about lost for all time… after Smith’s death in 1865 his family chose to “pass” as white and until recently were completely unaware of their heritage or connection to a truly fascinating figure. Check out the video below of actor Danny Glover portraying Dr. Smith. Click the red triangle at the bottom of the video box to start. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVR1sVIQzFI]
Great, we now have the world’s biggest Pryor website. NOW WHAT? The website got started to deal with all the misinformation on the genealogy websites. The really bad information persists although there’s been a lot of work to untangle the Pryor lines. I read all the time of people who’ve hit a brick wall in their genealogy. Walls are like the old camp song… you can go over them, around them, build a door to go through them. Spending our resources searching to prove a family tie or find more information on an undocumented line is more like digging a hole. Once you get in (and get convinced that the bad information is true) it’s really hard to get out of it and change course. The Tennessee Pryor website has been move like the spring and autum gardening practice of moving plants… we’re digging up the answers and rearranging our roots into correct lineages. Come along… read about the research and weigh the facts, help put together the answers on our Pryor lines!