Often times families find themselves facing adversity, desiring change and a new direction to take their lives. This desire can lead them to all new places, with all new challenges, all new faces, and all new dreams. Sometimes the difficulties people face are unknown to the world, other times they are obvious.
This evolution is evident throughout my family’s ancestry. A man named Thomas Ussery was born in 1741 in Lunenburg, Virginia. During his seventy-year life span, he served in the Revolutionary War, and later married a woman named Sarah, with whom he had seven kids. Generations passed, and in search of new work and a good home, the family found its way from Virginia to North Carolina, and later to Alabama. Thomas eventually had a great granddaughter named Isabella Faulkner, who was born in 1861.
Around the same time Thomas was fighting in the Revolutionary War, another man named John Goodwin was born in Shropshire, England. By the year 1808, John and his wife had immigrated to Henry, Georgia, where they together had a son named Asa. Asa and his family, pursuing a new direction in their lives, migrated from their home in Georgia to a new home in Shelby County, Alabama. Asa’s grandson, Thomas Goodwin, was later born in 1854.
Thomas Goodwin and his wife with several of their children.
The two families’ paths collided when Thomas Goodwin and Isabella Faulkner married on October 26, 1878. Life eventually settled down for the family, and Thomas found work as a contractor. Together Thomas and Isabella had a total of eleven children, including Benjamin Goodwin, who was born in 1887. On December 24, 1912, Benjamin married a woman named Frances Ola, and together they had a daughter named Francis Goodwin – my great grandmother who is still alive at age 96.
Benjamin and Frances Ola Goodwin.
The generations since Thomas and Isabella have all been hard workers, finding work wherever they could, and providing for the families in the best way they could. My great grandmother and her husband Phillip Stone eventually opened and ran a supermarket together. The Stone family seemed to have found a permanent home, and both my grandmother and mother were later born in Birmingham, Alabama.
After years of moving around, my family had molded Alabama to be its true home. Asa’s initial decision to move from Georgia to Alabama, in addition to the Ussery’s migration from Virginia to Alabama, eventually played a background role in my mother’s decision to attend the University of Alabama. She later met and married my father, who also attended Alabama. Both my sister and I followed in their footsteps, and because of our ancestry we both have found our way to the University of Alabama.
Evidently, the decisions my ancestors made in regard to their personal difficulties, dreams, and desires have had just as much of an impact on my life as have the decisions I personally make everyday. While the force that drove them from place to place is not always completely clear, it is rather obvious that the decisions were made in pursuit of something new, and maybe in desire of something greater than they had ever known.