Ancestors

John Calvin Shirley

John Calvin Shirley was born on 12 December 1843 in Jackson County, Alabama, in the far northeastern corner of the state where it meets Tennessee and Georgia. He was the only son of John Shirley, a Tennessee-born school teacher, and Mary Margaret Huddleston, called Maggie, of Kentucky.

In November 1850 he was 7, living in District 14 of Jackson County with his parents and five sisters: Mary, Sarah, Lydia, Mahala and Lucinda. His father gave his trade as school teacher. His Huddleston grandmother Mahala, 65, and an aunt, Lydia Huddleston, lived with them.

His father died in 1858, when John was fourteen. His mother married Jordan Peacock, a Georgia-born farmer, and in June 1860 John C. Shirley, 16, was working as a laborer on the Peacock place near Stevenson, with three of his sisters and a new half-sister, Nancy C. Peacock.

He served in the Confederate army. On 12 August 1865, soon after he came home, he married Martha Ann Foshee, a Georgia-born girl of 21 whose family farmed near Stevenson.

In 1870 the census taker found the young family at Pleasant Grove, beat 7, in Jackson County. The clerk wrote the name Sherley. John was about 25, Martha A. was 25 and born in Georgia, and they had two daughters: Emma, 3, and Evaline, 1. By 1880 there were five children at home: Jackson, Emma, Eva, Minnie and John.

Besides farming, John taught school, as his father had, and served as a postmaster, by his memorial.

He died at Stevenson on 24 July 1881, aged 37, and is buried in the Caperton Cemetery, where the family marker for his parents also stands. Martha raised the children as a widow and lived until 1909. Their eldest daughter, Emma Luona, had married Robert Alexander McGraw at Stevenson the year after his death, in October 1882.

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Cite: Heirology, "John Calvin Shirley (1843-1881)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-calvin-shirley-1843-1881-07e7eb.