Fruits of One Tree

  One of the ancestors we have a photo of is Amanda Fuson. It shows a young woman with blue eyes and brown hair. I include here a cleaned-up, closeup version of the original shown at the end of this blog. She was my husband’s great-grandmother on the Jobe side of the family. Having a photo is fortunate since we don’t know much about her. She lived in a time and place where few records survived, and even fewer were about women, since it was rare that a woman owned anything in her own name or had any occupation other than housework and childrearing. Her life was short, and she experienced loss and upheaval. Amanda’s family lived in the area where the borders of Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee come together. Her father William Fuson lived in Wayne County, Tennessee (due north of Lauderdale County, Alabama) in the 1830s and 1840s, but by the 1850s he was living in the northeast corner of Mississippi, in Tishomingo County. [1] The horizontal dashed line on the map is the Tennessee-M...