Ancestry Magazine

I discovered my love of genealogy while in college. By then, many of my older relatives were deceased. Pop Pop, however, lived until my senior year, and toward the end of his life, he told me the tale of his dad, my great-grandfather, Pre ston McEady.

Preston, said Pop Pop, was a short, brown-skinned man with an untalkative nature and an ungodly temper. He had an aversion to having his picture taken and, said Pop Pop, would never talk about his pre-marriage life. Sometime during the spring of 1908 in Georgia, Preston set out to buy a mule from a neighbor known for cheating African Americans. That didn’t matter to Preston, said Pop Pop. He knew a good deal when he saw one.

Two days later, Preston tried to return the mule. “This mule won’t work,” he told the neighbor. The neighbor’s answer? Too bad.

Preston wasn’t satisfied so he got the sheriff. The sheriff, however, sided with the neighbor. This caused a fight. The neighbor punched Preston. Preston punched back. The sheriff reached for his gun. Preston reached for his own gun and fired—the shot hit the sheriff, cutting off his nose.

Preston knew he’d be lynched for shooting a white man, the sheriff nonetheless. So he left, took off, running for—and catching—the nearest train. Pop Pop, who was only six, never saw his father again. The only contact the family had with Preston after that day was a single letter implying that he was living either in Louisiana or Texas. Preston, unfortunately, wouldn’t say which. He was afraid that the sheriff might be monitoring his mail.

Once I heard this tale, I felt an intense desire to know what had become of my great-grandfather Preston. I wanted to find out for Pop Pop, but, most of all, I wanted to find out for myself.

Pop Pop told me that Preston was from the Carolinas—a decent trek from where my family was in New Jersey. To make matters more confusing, Pop Pop didn’t know which of the Carolinas Preston hailed from. I decided to look anyway, approximating Preston’s year of birth as 1882, twenty years before Pop Pop’s birth. To try to justify this guess, I looked up Preston in the 1880 census. He wasn’t there .

I decided to check phone directories for McEadys, and I located some in Florida. I wrote to them, told them my story, and asked them if they knew Preston. No, they said, they didn’t know Preston. But they did tell me that the McEadys were originally from South Carolina and that their name had been spelled a variety of ways. However, the original name was simply Eady.

I decided to use their information and start my search with South Carolina and look for the last name Eady in the census. This time I found not one Preston, but two—both living in South Carolina in Pee Dee Township. Both Preston Eadys were black, but one was born in 1877 and the other one was born in 1861.

Now I was in a quandary—was one of these my ancestor? I decided to check the 1900 census for Eadys in Laurens County, Georgia, since I knew my grandfather was born there. I could compare the age of the Preston there to the Prestons in the South Carolina census. I found the younger Preston living with an Elmira in another county in Georgia, but I didn’t find the older Preston.

I knew that the Preston I was looking for had married my great-grandmother Lizzie Burch in Laurens County. I searched the Laurens County Probate Court and found a marriage license issued to Elizabeth Burch and Presley McEadey on 8 May 1892. So now he was using Presley and McEadey instead of Preston and Eady.

The younger Preston was born in 1877 and that would make him fifteen if he had gotten married in 1892. It was young, but not out of the realm of possibility. But I knew my great-grandmother was twenty when she got married, and I doubted that she would have married such a younger man. Besides, the census had the younger Preston married to another woman. These reasons lead me to believe that the Preston born in 1861 was probably my great-grandfather.

Armed with information, I attempted to trace the older Preston through the 1910 census. I knew that he left Georgia around 1908 or 1910, so I doubted I would find him. I found Lizzie Eady living with Pop Pop (Melvin) and three other children. She was listed as single. Preston was already gone.

I made a couple of blind stabs at locating him, looking through censuses for Louisiana and Texas but with no luck. I also tried to request a death certificate from the Texas Board of Health, but I had no idea of when or where he died or if he had ever even been in Texas. I struck out on a similar request in Louisiana.

Then one day, my Uncle Jerry happened to mention that when he was younger, a stranger approached him and said, “Hey, McEady!” When my uncle inquired how this stranger knew his name, the stranger replied, “Aren’t you one of the Lake Charles McEadys? There’s a bunch of them down there and you look just like ‘em.”

Lake Charles, Louisiana—finally a clue. I knew that it was just a shot in the dark, but I wrote again to the Louisiana Board of Health for a death certificate, anyway. They still couldn’t find him.

And with that, I just gave up.

Then one day at my job years later, something unusual occurred—I got a message from Brenda McEady. Who was Brenda McEady? I had no idea. But I knew my Aunt Melvina had a number of kids and I knew only a few of them by name. Maybe Brenda was one of hers.

I dialed Brenda’s number and told her who I was, and she, in turn, told me that she had received my name from a mutual business contact. Then we started comparing family stories and discovered both of our families were from South Carolina originally and both of them moved to Georgia. We wondered if we might be related. We decided to meet.

At our meeting, Brenda showed me a picture of her daughter—the spitting image of my cousin. I knew then that we had to be related, but neither Brenda nor I knew how. Brenda gave me her aunt Rosalee’s number, telling me that her aunt would definitely know more.

I was apprehens ive about calling a stranger so I spent a few weeks building up my nerve. Eventually I called. And was I glad I did. Rosalee Charles, nee McEady, told me that my great-grandfather Preston was her granduncle.

She knew that Preston had gotten into trouble with the law in South Carolina (this was before he ever got to Georgia). And just like the story I heard, this one, too, had Preston leaving the state in a hurry with no one ever hearing from him again. This probably explained why Preston never divulged his past to Pop Pop.

I still haven’t found out what happened to Preston after he fled Georgia, but that day, I learned why I’d never met more than a few relatives on the McEady side of my family. Preston severed the ties, and his own brothers and sisters hadn’t heard anything more from him than his own son had when a similar situation arose again years later.

But I found them, Pop Pop’s and my extended family. And next month, my family—the Yankee McEadys—finally plan to meet my other family—the Dixie McEadys—for a giant McEady family reunion. After all these years, what an amazing gathering that will be.

Vivian J. McEady-Lindsey is a wheelchair-bound, forty-six-year-old mom living in New Jersey. She has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pencil.