Wilkes County, Georgia, created in the year 1777, is the parent of Elbert, Oglethorpe, and Lincoln counties and parts of the counties of Greene, Hart, Madison, Taliaferro, and Warren. It comprised one-third of the population of the state in 1790. The records in this excellent little book are supplementary to Mrs. Grace G. Davidson's "Early Records of Georgia: Wilkes County" (1932, 1933) and are designed to assist the researcher in making a detailed survey of the oldest records in the Ordinary's office, once known as the Inferior Court office. The records--principally wills and settlements of estates, but also deeds of gift, inheritances, and marriage bonds--have more than ordinary genealogical significance, as they name not only principals but also beneficiaries (showing relationships), as well as witnesses and executors. The material is mostly of the period dating from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries and identifies nearly 5,000 early Georgians.

Robert Toombs of Georgia stands as one of the most fiery and influential politicians of the nineteenth century. Sarcastic, charming, egotistical, and gracious, he rose quickly from state office to congressman to senator in the decades before the Civil War. Though he sought sectional reconciliation throughout the 1840s and 1850s, he eventually became one of the South's most ardent secessionists. This thorough biography chronicles his days as a student and young lawyer in Georgia, his boisterous political career, his appointment as the Confederacy's first Secretary of State, his unsuccessful stint as a Confederate general, and his role as a proud, unreconstructed rebel after the war. An exploration of Toombs' career reveals the political forces and missteps that drove him--and people like him--to want to secede from the United States.

The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Vold Forde, Author What questions would you like to ask your grandmothers, great grandmothers or tenth great grandmothers? In this work, the authors of the "grandmother stories"(Dr. Forde and cousins) imaginatively ask their grandmothers questions about the source of their indomitable spirit; and as you read, you will appreciate the choice. The centerpiece of the book consists of interpretative essays featuring our grandmothers in times of trial and times of joy. The essays are accompanied by descriptive chronologies, with the reader appropriately instructed by maps from each period, photographs, sketches, portraits and recipes. An encyclopedic Appendix in CD-ROM form offers further documentation, extensive genealogies, and even more maps, photographs, and archival materials; all of which will eventually be published as Volume II. The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Vold Forde's valiant work of genealogy presented herein is encyclopedic, intelligible and thoroughly entertaining. Lineages of our scattered kindred so lovingly compiled by her, are a "collection for remembrance" inspired by the faithful lives of ten generations of Southern ancestors. Impressive archival research and background materials on the Bankston, Brooks, Cobb, Hamlin, Henderson, Ivey, Jarrett, Lea, McDonald, Miller, Rambo, and Sappingtons of Georgia lines are included. Within the pages of this book, you will find adventure, love, war, peace, depression, and prosperity in the lives of our valiant colonial, pioneer, antebellum and postbellum ancestors. You may correlate traits of these brave and steadfast women with those in your own mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters. If you seek a greater understanding of your Southern ancestry and of yourself, you will surely find it here.