One morning while my wife enjoyed a well-earned late sleep, I delved into a genealogical project I've been working on for over a year. In my local (Statham, Georgia) cemetery rest the remains of one Sallie Pearlee Darby Hardeman Andrew, born in 1846, perhaps on September 27th or January 29th, to Julius and Nancy Hamilton Darby in Clarke County, Georgia.
Miss Darby married a George Lumpkin Hardeman on December 4, 1867 and it was in looking for his history that took me off on my latest tanget. Mr Hardeman died at age 39 in 1885 and was buried in the Bethabara Cemetery along US 78 in Oconee County, Georgia, which is about 6 miles due south of Statham where his widow was buried.
George was born in 1845 to Lumpkin Gower and Martha Lester Hardman in Georgia. Note that here the spelling of the name has changed. Lumpkin's father, Samuel Hardman was born on March 28, 1777 in Henry County, Virginia to Uriah and Fanny Chandler Hardman. It was in looking for more information on Uriah that my route detoured even more. In 1752, Uriah's father, a John Hardman, sold Uriah 100 acres of land, apparently in preparation for marriage. In 1778, Uriah sold the land to Jesse Willingham, his brother-in-law, and moved to Wilkes County, NC where he bought 60 acres. In 1782, he sold the 60 acres to a nephew and moved to Georgia.
In 1785 Uriah received a Georgia headright grant of 448 acres on Goosepond Creek in what is now Oglethorpe County. In 1790, he sold 200 acreas of the land and moved to South Carolina, where he lived until at least February of 1799 when he moved back to Georgia and settled on "The forks of Clouds Creek" near the present day town of Crawford, Georgia." At least one family historian, Jim Hardman, a distant nephew of Uriah, believes he may have been buried in the Clouds Creek Baptist Church cemetery, for while there is no marked grave for him, there are records of the church that mention his children, and, in a grove of trees beside the church, there are a number of graves marked only with field stones.
The name Clouds Creek caught my attention, so I let my keyboard take me to see what I else could find. The website for Clouds Creek Baptist Church has a pictorial of Howard's Covered Bridge which is nearby. Covered bridges are of particular interest to me for a couple of reasons. I spent many summer afternoons in a pool beneath one in my old hometown, and, a distant ancestor of mine, one Ithial Town (1784-1844) patented a form of wooden truss bridge in 1820 which became known as Town's Lattice Truss. In the church's website, there is a photograph of a sign erected by the Georgia Historical Society that says the bridge was constructed using the Town lattice design. Not only was I tickled to see that my ancestor's design was used, I was delighted to see that the name Town had been capitalized, keeping his name intact. There are other such bridges, including one here in Georgia, that spell the name without a capital.
Now you can see why I call it Tangential Genealogy. I started out looking for the family history of Sallie Darby, then moved on to her first husband's family, then to a church that a member of that family may or may not have attended, and finally to a Georgia covered bridge that was built using the design of a Connecticut architect who could trace his lineage back to my seventh great grandfather who came to these shores from England in about 1640.
Oh, one more tangent. The sign on Howard's Covered Bridge does contain an error, if only minor. It says that the trusses are fastened together with trunnels, or wooden pegs. The devices used are called tree nails (nails made from trees) or treenails, pronounced trunnels, much in the same way gun wales of a boat are pronounced gunnels. Blame the English for that.
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