Is this the sam little Mary Phagan that was killed in an industrial area; that a Black man was accused; that during his trial the Black man was cleared of all wrongdoing and the real killer brought to justice???
If you can answer "YES" then you and Amber Phagan are people I have been looking for for more years than I care to reveal......
As a child growing up, twice I watched a black & white movie about that particular event in history---on the late show.
The captions at the beginning of the movie clearly stated that this story was well documented in the Atlanta area newspapers as having happened.
The captions further stated that she was the couple's ONLY child and that she was the end of that line of phagan since the couple had the child so late in life and could have no more children....
It was not clear to me if they were saying the end of the line for the immediate family or if that couple was the end of that line as it had originall come to the states from over seas....
My mother tried to convince me it was the latter....but why she would have deliberately said that is another Paton Place Story in itself---to confuse and thwart my genealogy efforts....
As a child I used to sit at my grmother's knee and she would read from the family Bible stories and dates, etc about the struggles the clan endured to get to the USA. She and several of her children would tell the story of how two (2) brothers and their families Came to the Carolina Coast. AFter setting themselves up, they had no comprehension of the vast numbers that would follow or that were already here. They decided that one would keep the FAGAN spelling and the other brother would use the PHAGAN spelling. "Why?", you ask? The documented reason was so that if they got separated and couldn't find their way back to each other, then later generations would be able to recognize each other as being related.....
With the lack of education and a miriad of other reasons combined, most were not educated and some unable to read or write. They did know enough in those days to remember that people have always been told to spell it like it sounds.
Frequently, there were different varieties of how people were hearing the name pronounced and therefore numerous MISspellings---sometimes all for the same person and in the same document.
According to the Biblical documentation some of the PHagan epople got tired of arguing with others that it was ph instead of F and allowed their group to revert back to the Fagan spelling....Moses Phagan and his descentdants are a good example of this.
There are some of the group--it's not clear if it was a family feud or another version of spelling it like it sounds--of Fagan line that added and E to create FEAGAN.
Nunmerous time down thru history of the census enumerators decided which spelling they were going to use and often got it wrong and until recently "lost" a lot of our line of people for genealogy purposes.
Another waqy we have misplaced our line is that there were a good many times when boys were not given names but were given initials as a name....When they went into the service, the military command not only decided how their surname was going to be spelled, they sometimes did the deciding what name the intials were going to stand for -- in other cased they gave the enlisting person a chance to choose names for the initials---thereby losing their original identiy from there on to the grave.
It has been hotly debated all my life whether the Phagan group never bothered to push further west than the GA area or if some relatively unknow/unnoticed Phagan managed to escape to the west without any real notice so far as genealogy records would prove.
The rest of the Fagan group did push fruther west both per TN, AL, MS, TX, and other points west.
When my grandmother died she was living with her socalled favorite son and his wife. The daughter-in-law was so relieved to be rid of her that she stayed behind while the others were hanging around the funeral home and cleaned house....so clean that when the funeral was over and we all had gone back to the house, E V E R Y THING was cleared out that had belonged to grandma. This included the Bible that another daughter was going to use to prove the census wrong about her birth date for Social Security purposes. I have very vivid memories of them emptying trash cans, et trying to find what the daughter-in-law had done with the stuff but to no avail....and the d-n-l consistently denying any knowledge of how the stuff disappeared....
This Bible would have even told who was left in Ireland at the beginning of the 1700s when they left to come to the USA.....
Numerous futile efforts have been made over the years to reconstruct the line back to the time of the two brothers....
I am the only one still living of the relatives that remember ever being told the story of the original two brothers....
There was a [prtopm of the line that prospered and did really well for themselves. There were others in the line that took the attitude they were so relieved to be in the USA and untouchable by people persecuting them in Ireland, all they wanted to do was to lead really quiet, unobtrucive lives as they farmed their land and raised their children as they saw fit---as God fearing Christians. So therefore, they were the ones who for many years were looked down upon as the narry-do-well, have-not, dirt farmers.
Yet another very interesting phenomina for that time in history. People that did write usually were very well taught in the art of penmanship. Therefore many handwritings were very ornate and when records were made often it was exceedingly difficult distinguish in later years between script F T S, etc., lower case Es were made like Os are made today, lower case Rs and Ns were also frequently confusing to decipher.
According to my research and two other of my current-day cousins' research. the Margaret SEAGO(A)N was actually one of the members of the FAGAN line that somebody had added an E into.
If you are interested in this person I have limited proven data on Margaret.
If you like, I can also put you in touch with several others who have data on the FAGAN side of these two original brothers---until I told them and I started uncovering the proof, they did not know that some of the FAGANs in their research originally derived from the PHAGAN and knew nothing of the original story. They thought they had some excess FAGAN names that could not be connected up with our specific line...
HOPE I HAVE BORED YOU TO TEAR WITH THIS QUITE LENGTHY "DISSERTATION"
If you have any Qs, comments, data to share, please feel free to contact me at:
BRETTAHARTEI@AOL.COM