Randolph County is one of the counties in Alabama which has suffered the loss of probate records. The Courthouse burned in 1897 destroying all of the records up to that time. This book is a compilation of some early records of the county in an effort to make the existing material readily available for research. Included are three histories written on the county: "Early Days in Randolph County" by General B.F. Weathers; "Randolph County, Alabama, 62 Years Ago, the Red Man's Home, the White man's Eden" by J.M.K. Guinn and "Randolph County" by William Wallace Screws. Three early newspapers of the state, The Jacksonville Republican, The American Eagle, and The Randolph Enterprise provide marriages, obituaries, probate notices, etc., for the years 1841-1875 and 1895-1897. Also, Registers of Deaths from 1886-1897, found in the Department of Archives and History in Montgomery, are included, plus the 1850 Mortality Schedule, Alabama State Gazetteer and Business Directory 1887-1888, Civil War Pensioners, wills and deeds.
In fascinating detail, Civil War Alabama reveals the forgotten breadth of political opinions and loyalties among white Alabamians during the antebellum period. The book offers a major reevaluation of Alabama's secession crisis and path to war and destruction.
The civil rights revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the literature on Reconstruction in America by emphasizing the social history of emancipation and the hopefulness that reunification would bring equality. Much of this revisionist work served to counter and correct the racist and pro-Confederate accounts of Reconstruction written in the early twentieth century. While there have been modern scholarly revisions of individual states, most are decades old, and Michael W. Fitzgerald’s Reconstruction in Alabama is the first comprehensive reinterpretation of that state’s history in over a century. Fitzgerald’s work not only revises the existing troubling histories of the era, it also offers a compelling and innovative new look at the process of rebuilding Alabama following the war. Attending to an array of issues largely ignored until now, Fitzgerald’s history begins by analyzing the differences over slavery, secession, and war that divided Alabama’s whites, mostly along the lines of region and class. He examines the economic and political implications of defeat, focusing particularly on how freed slaves and their former masters mediated the postwar landscape. For a time, he suggests, whites and freedpeople coexisted mostly peaceably in some parts of the state under the Reconstruction government, as a recovering cotton economy bathed the plantation belt in profit. Later, when charting the rise and fall of the Republican Party, Fitzgerald shows that Alabama's new Republican government implemented an ambitious program of railroad subsidy, characterized by substantial corruption that eventually bankrupted the state and helped end Republican rule. He shows, however, that the state’s freedpeople and their preferred leaders were not the major players in this arena: they had other issues that mattered to them far more, like public education, civil rights, voting rights, and resisting the Klan’s terrorist violence. After Reconstruction ended, Fitzgerald suggests that white collective memory of the era fixated on black voting, big government, high taxes, and corruption, all of which buttressed the Jim Crow order in the state. This misguided understanding of the past encouraged Alabama's intransigence during the later civil rights era. Despite the power of faulty interpretations that united segregationists, Fitzgerald demonstrates that it was class and regional divisions over economic policy, as much as racial tension, that shaped the complex reality of Reconstruction in Alabama.
Jesse Arnett was born October 8, 1796, in Anson County, North Carolina. He married Martha Jane Robertson on December 11, 1823. She was born August 29, 1798, in North Carolina. Jesse died at the age of ninety, on November 12, 1886 in Bacon Level Community, Randolph County, Alabama. Martha Jane died at the age of eighty-three, on March 7, 1881 in Bacon Level Community, Randolph County, Alabama. They had ten children. Jesse Arnett and Martha Jane Robertson Arnett's life is followed from Anson County, North Carolina to Newton County, Georgia to Chambers County, Alabama and finally to Randolph County, Alabama. Descendants live in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and elsewhere.
"The County Courthouse Book is a concise guide to county courthouses and courthouse records. It is an important book because the genealogical researcher needs a reliable guide to American county courthouses, the main repositories of county records. To proceed in his investigations, the researcher needs current addresses and phone numbers, information about the coverage and availability of key courthouse records such as probate, land, naturalization, and vital records, and timely advice on the whole range of services available at the courthouse. Where available he will also need listings of current websites and e-mail addresses." -- Publisher website.
