On 1902, George W. Aldridge and his siblings received their shares of their father’s landholdings just north of Dudley, Wayne County. Three years later, George lost his at sheriff’s sale:
Goldsboro Weekly Argus, 15 June 1905.
Tag Archives: Aldridge
Confederate Citizens File: Mathew Aldridge.
Form of the estimate and assessment of agricultural products agreed upon by the assessor and tax-payer, and the value of the portion thereof to which the government is entitled, which is taxed in kind, in accordance with the provisions of Section 11 of “an Act to lay taxes for the common defence and carry on the government of the Confederate States,” said estimate and assessment to be made as soon as the crops are ready for market.
Cured Fodder Quantity of gross crop. — 1000 Tithe or one-tenth. – 100 Value of one-tenth. — $3.00
I, Mathew Aldridge of the County of Wayne and State of North Carolina do swear that the above is a true statement and estimate of all the agricultural products produced by me during the year 1863, which are taxable by the provisions of the 11th section of the above stated act, including what may have been sold of consumed by me, and of the value of that portion of said crops to which the government is entitled. /s/ Mathew X Aldridge
Sworn to and subscribed to before me the 3 day of December 1863, and I further certify that the above estimate and assessment has been agreed upon by said Mathew Aldridge and myself as a correct and true statement of the amount of his crops and the value of the portion to which the government is entitled. /s/ J.A. Lane, Assessor.
Confederate Papers Relating to Citizens or Business Firms, 1861-1865, National Archives and Records Administration.
The hoe penetrated to the tissue of the brain.
Goldsboro Headlight, 16 August 1900.
I don’t which Winn this is, but I am certain the Aldridge is my great-grandfather’s brother, John J. Aldridge. Here’s his World War I draft registration card, filed 17 years after this article was published:
(I’ve always wondered about the “skull broken about 12 years ago.”) Johnnie Aldridge not only recovered, but lived another 64 years after his horrific injury.
John J. Aldridge (1887-1964), son of John W. and Louvicey Artis Aldridge.
Your friend and great-aunt by marriage.
After Rev. Joseph Silver died, my grandmother received a letter from his widow:
Martha C. Silver is a bit of a mystery. She was born about 1873 in Halifax County to William Hilliard Hawkins (born 1833 to Ambrose and China Harwell Hawkins) and his wife Mary E. Hulin Hawkins (born 1840 to Hilliard and Tabitha Locklear Hulin), both born free. I have found her with her birth family in the 1880 census of Enfield, Halifax County. I lose sight of her, though, until 5 August 1912 when she is listed as Cary Hawkins Henderson in her father’s Halifax County will and then until 16 December 1925, when as “Martha C. Henderson” she married Joseph Aldridge (born 1869), my great-great-great-grandfather John W. Aldridge‘s younger brother. (I cannot find a marriage license for Martha and any Henderson (much less one related to me).) In the 1930 census of Goldsboro, Wayne County, “Carry” Aldridge is listed with Joseph and his children by his deceased first wife, Louberta Manley. Joseph died in 1934, and I lose Martha again until 8 September 1943 when she married Joseph Silver in Wayne County. He was 86 (and widowed five years previously by the death of my great-great-great-aunt Sarah Henderson Jacobs Silver), and she was 70. Martha returned to Halifax County and remained there at least until Rev. Silver died in 1958. Past that, though, I know little, for I have not found her death certificate.
A few years ago, I obtained a copy of a photo of family group from someone who knew only that they were Aldridges. Last year, a cousin confirmed what I had suspected. Eight of the nine people pictured above are Joseph and Louberta M. Aldridge’s children. The ninth? Martha Cary Hawkins Henderson Aldridge Silver, with whom they remained close even after their father’s death. My cousin told me that Martha had children of her own when she married Joseph Aldridge and had gone to live with a son in Washington DC in her latter years. My cousin and her father, Joseph’s son George, visited her regularly until her death at age 100 or older. [Update: on 27 May 2014, Martha’s grandson contacted me and advised that, while she had a son named Charles who lived in New York, Martha had spent her final years with her daughter in DC.]
(By the way, the “Johnnie Aldridge of Dudley” referred to in the letter was Joseph’s nephew, and my great-great-uncle, John J. Aldridge. “Reka” was Reka Aldridge Ashford Morrisey, daughter of Joseph’s brother George W. Aldridge. Luke Morrisey was her husband.)
Hat tip to Patricia Aldridge Polack for her identification of William J.B. Aldridge, Milford Aldridge, Lillie Mae Aldridge, George Mitchell Aldridge and Joseph Leon Aldridge (top) and Daniel W. Aldridge, Allen Aldridge and Mary Eliza Aldridge Sawyer (below).
In remembrance, if not memory.
My great-grandfather, James Thomas Aldridge, was born 127 years ago today. Ordinarily, I’d do a “remembering so-and-so” kind of post, but something stays my hand. I don’t literally remember him, of course, but that’s not surprising. The problem is neither my father nor my grandmother, if she were living, could really say they much remember him either.
Nora and them stayed up there where the old house burnt down. And her mama, Aint Vicey — we called her Aint Vicey, but she was my grandmama. Her son was my daddy. And I stayed at Nora’s, they taken me up there, and Johnny always bring me watermelons. He’d say, “You just like your daddy.” And those kinds of things. So I ain’t made nothing outn it. I said, whatever. I would just say something like, well, “I’m some kin to the Aldridges.”
Johnny, he called me and I was working to the hospital. And he called me and told me, at least he called the hospital and wanted to speak to me: “Well, if you want to see your daddy – you said you ain’t never seen him before – come down here. He’s down here now. So, don’t let him know I told you.” So, I went down – I said, well, I’m gon go down there and see Silas Cox ‘bout selling the lots where Grandma Mag’s house was on. So, I got off. So, I got Mr. Fisher to take me down there. I said, “Mm, I wanna see that man.” So Nora had been all good to me and always said, ‘bout, “Tom was your daddy,” and she’d come and visit me, and I’d go down there, go down there and stay with her. When Jesse was a baby, I went down there and stayed. And when I was a child, when I went up to New York, that’s when Frances took me ‘cause I was her son’s, her brother’s child. I said, then in later years, nobody wanted to own me. But whatever.
So my grandmother met her father only once, after his brother Johnnie Aldridge called and she invented a ruse for stopping by his sister’s Nora Aldridge Henderson‘s house. The visit did not go terribly well, and Nora, to whom she’d been closest, never spoke to her again. My grandmother had spent time with her grandmother Vicey Artis Aldridge and aunts in Dudley and had started school in New York City while living with Tom’s sister Frances Aldridge Cooper Newsome, but over time — after Tom married and as his professional star rose — the Aldridges mostly drifted away. Or clanged shut the door.
Science has settled the question of my grandmother’s kinship to the Aldridges, though she did not live long enough for the validation. Happy birthday, Tom Aldridge.
——
Interview of Hattie Henderson Ricks by Lisa Y. Henderson; all rights reserved.
“Nothing else than socialized medicine.”
Well, damn.
Dr. James T. Aldrich [born Aldridge] was my great-grandfather. Never mind what it says below, he was born in 1886.
Journal of the National Medical Association, November 1959.
Remembering Aunt “Lit.”
Remembering Catherine Aldridge Davis (22 August 1900-3 April 2009), daughter of John W. and Louvicey Artis Aldridge.
Lincoln University, Class of ’95.
Mack Daniel Coley was born in 1866 in northern Wayne County. He graduated from Hampton Institute’s preparatory division in 1890, then received a bachelor’s degree from Lincoln in 1895. He returned to North Carolina shortly after and, in November 1896, married fellow Hampton graduate Hattie B. Wynn, daughter of Charles W. and Frances Aldridge Winn.
M.D. Coley’s remarkable career as educator — and lawyer — was chronicled in Arthur Bunyan Caldwell’s History of the American Negro and His Institutions (1921):
[Sidenote: Mack Coley appears in the 1870 census of Wayne Coley in a household headed by Winney Coley. At age 61, she is too old to have been his mother (never mind the bad information posted on a dozen family trees on Ancestry.com.) Grandmother, perhaps? If so, how do the Yelvertons mentioned above fit? Winnie Coley is not kin, but she was the mother of children by Napoleon Hagans and Adam T. Artis. Stay tuned.]
Poll holder — in Fremont???
Wilmington Messenger, 3 April 1889.
John W. Aldridge was born in northern Sampson County and grew up near Dudley in southern Wayne County. In the late 1870s, he and his brother George taught at a school near Fremont, in northern Wayne County, where John met and married his wife Louvicey Artis in 1879. I had always assumed that the couple immediately returned to Dudley to raise their family and establish a farm and later a general store. However, this announcement clearly shows that John Aldridge was a firmly entrenched resident of the Fremont district as late as 1889. (In hindsight, this would explain why the Aldridges do not appear in Congregational Church records in the 1880s and 1890s.) When did the family return to Dudley? John and his brothers George and Matthew purchased land together in the 1870s. I’ve never looked at these deeds in detail, but clearly need to do so. Are there other traces of John Aldridge’s tenure in north Wayne?
A glimpse of Uncle Sloan.
David Sloan Aldridge is the mystery brother. Born about 1858, he was Robert and Mary Eliza Balkcum Aldridge‘s fourth son and fifth child and appears with them in the Wayne County censuses of 1860, 1870 and 1880. By 1896, David, also called Sloan, had married Lillie Uzzell, though no license has been found. The couple filed three deeds for real estate purchases in Goldsboro and Grantham township in the late 1890s. In 1900, David and Lillie (called Dilley in the census) are listed in Goldsboro, and he received his share of his father’s estate in 1902. And then he disappeared.
Goldsboro Weekly Argus, 1 September 1904.
I have not found David S. Aldridge in the 1910 census or after. Until I found this article last night, I had no record of him beyond Robert Aldridge’s estate settlement. The lots offered at auction were jointly purchased by David and his wife. In 1904, after his wife’s death, David sold his share in the property to Lillie Uzzell’s sole heir, her adult son, and, after this notice was published, disappears from the record again.
Scuffalong: Genealogy. 