To Amber Phagan:
If you are still keeping track of these messages on this site, please take these facts into consideration.
There was a black & white movie made regarding the murder of Mary Phagan, the accused, trial, and finally the unveiling of the real murderer.
The preface that we all had to read and listen to a narrator in the background clearly stated:
Mary Phagan was an only child; that her parents had her late in life after consoling themselves that they would have a childless marriage; & therefore, when this child was killed that this Phagan line came to an end!!
Now!! It was never clearly defined whether or not the comment..."this Phagan line came to an end"...was solely referring to the Mary Phagan & her parents' line only----which would mean that her father had other siblings----OR if her father had been the only direct Phagan descendant of his line of Phagan & with no body to pass the Phagan name on that it was therefore..."the end of the Phagan line"....
My line of FAGANs traces the ancestors to at least 2 brothers that came into the U S per the Carolinas--before it was divided into N & S and TN & GA also benefitting from the break up.
The two brothers decided that one would leave the spelling FAGAN & that the other one would start spelling the name PHagan. They were quite naive to facts that others might also already have that name, etc...
Their reasoning was so that if their descendants got scattered out/separated from the main clan, that future generations would be able to recognize each other by the spellings....DUH!!
Numerous times when I was growing up, I would listen to conversations about the two lines & what happened to the PH line. It was told (& my research has proved some of this to be true) that some of the PH clan decided to alter the PH spelling...
1) Reasoning that if the real name was Fagan why shouldn't theirs be Pagan...
2) Some, after 1 or 2 generations of people arguing with them what the spelling should be, came to the conclusion that they would return their family to spelling the name Fagan---that after all that is what it had been for many generations...
3) Others felt duty-bound to abide by the decisions made by the original American family Patriarch(s) and left it PHagan.
4) In the mean time, a variety of people took it upon themselves to create public/legal records, etc., that spelled the name as it sounded like people were pronouncing it rather than how Bible records, etc said it should be spelled...thereby creating great difficulty following these lines---considering a lot of them had veeerry heavy Irish brogues that did not pronounce certain letters as we English speaking people today pronounce them.
I have found Census records in GA & AL where FAGAN was spelled like the Fagan person giving the data had pronounced the word FAGAN...They were enumerated that year as Yeagin; other times the Y was replaced with the F--sometime as Feagin, sometimes as Fagin, and other times with the i actually replaced with the a as in Feagan, Fagan----Other dimension alson spelled it with an S on the end as in the Fagans tole me these are their children....But leading people to believe that the word was not a plural but the actual spelling of the name.
In later years, don't be a child that was given a name of nothing but initials!!!! Oh, my!!! Because when they went into the military some were told to pick a name for the initials to stand for; others, the military dictated the name for the initals...once again, confusing genealogy research records...
Bretta Harte
spypuppy007@yahoo.com