Tennessee Pryors

The REED COLLECTION is now on the website! More than 40 amazing photos of Pryors and their allied lines from Sumner County, TN and Farmersville, Collin County, TX. There are several tin-type photos from the 1860’s and 1870’s, lots of photos of the children and grandchildren of Allen L. Pryor. Ms. Reed is a gracious benefactor to the website… bringing history out of the family album for all of us to enjoy! These photos are now on Shutterfly.com and 300dpi (print quality images are available to anyone who wants to prints. If you are a UPromise.com member for college savings… Shutterfly contributes 7%. The TN Pryor website is not selling these photos, Shutterfly is a reasonable price source for photo printing and offers the ability to let everyone share in these photos. PLEASE… if you can identify anyone let us know!

Recently there have been terrific postings to the Pryor-RootsWeb mailing list. William Lindsey, a detailed and accurate researcher, is posting his findings on the line of Richard Pryor and Mourning Thompson. If you aren’t a member of the mailing list you are missing some great information! On the RootsWeb site you can read archived mail from the list all the way back to 1997! To join the list or read archived mail visit http://lists.rootsweb.com

The Missouri Pryors piqued my interest. Are Samuel, Emsley, and James Pryor of St. Joseph, MO related. Samuel is the the patriarch of the musical Pryors (and father of trombonist Arthur Pryor). Emsley served as a bugler in the Civil War leading one to hope that he may be part of this musical line, while both Emsley and James were employed as cistern and well diggers. All three families lived near eachother the Washington area of St. Joseph. All 3 were born prior to 1850 yet do not appear on a census until 1870. The Pension file didn’t hold any remarkable discoveries, but provided the names and birthdates of Emsley’s children.

A new addition to the website. On the home page you’ll now find a link to a blog. I’m testing this out to see if there is an interest in keeping up with Pryor research through the Blog. If any of the TN Pryor subscribers have their own genealogy Blog, let me know I will consider linking to it.

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.

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!