Finally Harriet!

In the breaking down of brick walls, no one ever mentions time as a strategy. But time is the very thing that has prompted Harriet to give up at least a few of her secrets. After hitting my head many times on that brick wall, I turned my attention elsewhere for several years. Not long ago, I randomly typed her name into a search box and hit the jackpot!


Harriet N. Hubbard is my great, great grandmother. I've been able to piece together a good bit of information about her through census records and land records. Her husband, Zachariah Hubbard was about 15 years her senior. Her husband, while not rich, did have a respectable land holding. She had eight children: John, William, Alexander, Milton Reese, Myra, James, Sarah and America, all presumably with Zachariah. Her husband was a farmer and they lived most of their lives in Oconee County, South Carolina. At some point in the last years of the 1850s, the Hubbard family moved to Cass County, Georgia where Harriet and Zachariah lived until sometime before 1868 when Zachariah registered to vote back in Oconee County, South Carolina. Harriet was widowed in the summer of 1885 according to an obituary found in the Keowee Courier, the local newspaper in that area.


While that sounds like a lot to know, until recently I have not been able to find her maiden name or when she died. Time solved that problem for me. Since I last searched for her, both FamilySearch.org and Google Books have been quite busy.


Several weeks ago, I randomly typed her name into the Family Search form and up popped a death certificate for her son Milton. Her daughter in law, who was born and raised in Oconee County, South Carolina, was the informant. And on the form....Harriet's maiden name, Hunnicutt. (I still need to find this information in other places to back this up.)


Then I moved on to Google Books. I was prompted to do this by a comment I read on an old Genforum post. Here I found two publications, Reports of Cases Heard and Determined by the Supreme Court of South Carolina, Vol. LXXIV, Containing Cases of November Term, 1905 and April Term, 1906 and The Southeastern Reporter, Vol. 54. Both reviewed the same case involving a land dispute between two of Harriet's children that had been appealed all the way to the Supreme Court of South Carolina. In these articles I discovered that Harriet died 7 October 1896 and that she needed care at the end of her life due to a broken leg. So, more of the pieces of the puzzle fall in to place. I can hardly wait to go look up the original case! 


There's a lot yet to do to really get to know about Harriet and her life. There are many things I would like to ask her. So, I'll continue to search for her periodically to see how she answers.