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A Hartage Family History: From Slavery to the 1950s
An Account of Webster Joshua Hartage (c.1851-1887) and
Manerva Mathis-Butts Hartage (c.1853-1927) and of Their Descendants
Introduction and First Chapter
By Clarence D. White
Presented to the Sixteenth Hartage Family Reunion
June 28-30, 2019
Orlando, Florida
Introduction
This paper marks the
start of an integrated family history in which I update, correct, synthesize
and supplement the various writings that I have done since 1986, when I
prepared a family history and reunion program booklet for the second reunion in
Jacksonville, Florida. Having ready access to demographic data such as census records, death
certificates and marriage certificates on Ancestry.com and its free
counterpart--familysearch.org—enables, indeed facilitates, this work. Both
websites are sponsored by the Mormons’s The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints. Research that took countless hours loading, viewing and copying from
microfilm of US Census records (also published by the LDS denomination) at the
downtown Atlanta public library 25 or 30 years ago can now be accomplished
online in a small fraction of the time. My plan is to complete this work over
the next few years and to publish it on the Marion County history website at http://www.thegagenweb.com/marion/index.htm.
Chapter One--Family
Origins in Slavery and Reconstruction
The history of the African Hartages in Marion County,
Georgia during slavery is easy to trace because there was only one: Webster
Joshua, who was the only slave belonging to Zachariah Hardage and Delilah
Peebles Hardage. (This is the usual spelling of this old English surname,
Hardage. When George, oldest son of Webster Joshua, learned to read and write,
he changed the spelling, whether deliberately or in error is not clear.) The slave
schedule of 1860 for Marion County lists a nine-year- old black male slave
living in the household of this couple at Red Bone (now Brantley) along with
their three children aged 4, 3 and 1. The slave censuses did not list the
slaves by name, only the name of their owner, their sex, color, and age, and
the number of slave houses. We can be sure, however, of Webster’s identity
because the 1870 census lists him by name, age 18, as living in the household
of his former owners at Red Bone along with their five children. The rock
chimney of the house on the old Hardage homestead still stands on the east side
of present-day Hartage Ford Road at Brantley. One wonders if Webster Joshua was
an orphan or if he had been separated from his family through a sale. Zack and
Delilah Hardage may have been able to afford only him. They were of modest
means, owning 300-400 acres of land, according to the valuation in the 1860
census.
In 2002 at the Ninth Hartage
Family Reunion the author read a paper on the origins of the African Hartage,
Battle and Shipp families during slavery and Reconstruction which was posted on
the Marion County History website at http://www.thegagenweb.com/marion/bio/hart/hbs.htm. Subsequently several readers who were descendants of
the slaveholders replied to him, including Charles Marlin Hardage of Buena
Vista, Georgia, great grandson of Zachariah White Hardage and Delilah Peebles
Hardage. Mr. Hardage had no knowledge or records of slaves owned by his
ancestors. Therefore, he was unable to shed light on whether Webster Hartage
was an orphan or whether he had been separated from his family through a sale
or perhaps a division of slaves among heirs pursuant to a will or inheritance
laws. Nevertheless, he disclosed that the Hardage genealogy goes back to
Derbyshire, England in the late 1500s, that the first immigrants to America
settled in Maryland and Westmoreland County, Virginia, that some of them
relocated to Edgefield County, South Carolina near the Georgia border and
Augusta, that some then relocated to Upson County (Thomaston), and some moved
from there to Marion County soon after it was formed in 1827. Later, some
family members left Marion County and moved to Mississippi. As the slaveholders
moved, they would have taken their slaves with them. It’s not difficult to
imagine a network of undiscovered kinship across several states among persons
named Hardage or Hartage or whose ancestors had marriage or other union with
them. Over time DNA tests results could provide clues.
The first written record of the union of Manerva Mathis
Butts Hartage (c.1853-1927) and Webster Joshua Hartage (c.1851-1887) is the
census of 1880. No marriage license was recorded. In 1880, Webster, aged 28,
and Manerva, 24, were enumerated as husband and wife at Tazewell along with
children Brister 8, George (mistakenly recorded as Georgia, a female) 7, Martha
3 and Richard (aka Robert and Dink) 8 months. There were several slaveholders
In Marion County named Mathis in 1850 and 1860 who could have owned Manerva and
her family. Lewis Mathis of Fort Perry, north of Red Bone, had a daughter named
Minerva, born 1841, who might have been Manerva’s namesake. Manerva’s death
certificate of 1927, in which her son Dink Hartage is informant, names Issac
Mathis as her father but the mother’s maiden name is “unknown.” For years the
assertion that Manerva had native American—Creek—ancestry has circulated in the
Hartage family, but this claim is belied by the fact that several Ancestry DNA
tests among her descendants show no such genetic result. Many family members,
including Rev. George Hartage, were thought to look like Indians, with broad
noses, the right facial and lip color and shape, and other facial features
common to the Creeks. One can find on the Internet images of Creeks currently
living in Oklahoma that look like some Hartages, but the Hartage look derives
from West Africa, not from the Creek Nation, according to several Ancestry.com
results for several Hartages.
This author has for years
been unable to locate a Manerva Mathis in the 1870 census when she would have
been around 17 years old. After intense scrutiny, the only Manerva he located
in Marion County was one Manerva living in a Johnsin or Johnson household at
Tazewell, and the penmanship was virtually unreadable. Because he was looking
for Mathis, not Johnsin or Johnson, the information was simply put away. Yet
the family knew from received oral reports that before she married Webster,
Manerva had two children by a man named Butts. No one knew if she was married
to Mr. Butts. Her first child Jonas Butts was raised by the Butts family and
took their surname while the second child named Bris or Brister or Briseo lived
with her and Webster Hartage and was surnamed Hartage. Only now in 2019 after
examining census data for 1870 and 1880 together did the truth emerge in an
aha! moment. The census of 1870 shows one Manerva Johnson, 13, living at
Tazewell with one Nelson Johnson, 33, and a Mary Johnson, 30, Isiah 10 and Hoke
8. The 1870 census did not ask what relationship individuals in a household had
to the household head, whether wife, son, daughter, or other. Some
African-American families named Butt or Butts live in the neighborhood. A white
family headed by Samuel and Eady Johnson reside in the same neighborhood. In
1880, Nelson Butt 38 and Mary Ann Butt 38 were counted at Tazewell
with Jonas Butt 5, listed as son, along with son Stokes 15, daughter Roxy Ann 5
months, and niece Mary Ann 5. Between 1870 and 1880, Nelson and Mary Ann
changed their surname from Johnson to Butt. Looking back, it seems clear that
Manerva Mathis at a young age was living in 1870 in a ménage à
trois relationship with a much older man and his common law wife amid the
upheaval and displacement of Reconstruction, and that she bore two children for
him before marrying Webster Hardage around 1872. Perhaps the ménage was considered shameful and scandalous, which
might explain the change in surname between 1870 and 1880. The name change also
raises the question of how much kinship Nelson felt or knew he had to other
blacks named Butt who lived in the neighborhood. In any case, the question of
whether Manerva was married to Mr. Butts is settled: Manerva could not have
been considered married to Nelson Butts since he already had a wife—Mary Ann.
Beyond the information in her death certificate, there
is considerable circumstantial support of the proposition that Manerva was a
Mathis and that her father was Issac Mathis. She lived most of her life at
Doyle and Tazewell proximate to Mose Mathis, presumably her brother, and his
wife Mary. In fact, many family members of her generation and the next two
lived and worked in the same communities. Most were members of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church. We should, based on oral reports, shared religious
preference, and living patterns, accept that Mose Mathis (born 1875), Issac
Mathis II (1873-1948, those dates according to his daughter Morris Mathis
Hawkins), and Ike Mathis (born 1874) were her siblings. Mose Mathis, born 1834
in Georgia, would seem to have been her uncle. His wife and her presumed aunt
Harriett--who was born in 1843 in North Carolina, according to her death
certificate--is buried in an unmarked grave at Mahalia Chapel AME Church
Cemetery, as is Manerva. Only their general locations are known. The burial
place of Webster Hartage is unknown.
A Hartage Family History: From Slavery to the 1950s
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