John Ranson Fuller
John R. Fuller was born in Laurens County, South Carolina, in November 1850. He was the eldest child of Green Berry Fuller, a farmer, and Edna Nelson, who had married young: in the summer of 1850 Green Berry was 20 and Edney, as the census taker wrote her name, was 15, and they were living alone in their first house in Laurens County.
In June 1860 the family was farming near the Waterloo post office in the south of Laurens County. Green Berry, 33, owned land worth $650 and other property worth $500. John, called Jno on the census, was 9, with a brother William, 7, sisters Maria, 6, and Nancy, 4, and a baby brother Elihu. Two other boys lived with them that year: William Pinson, 13, and John M. Nelson, 16, both at school.
He was a boy of ten when the Civil War began. His grave at Laurens has an upright Confederate marker, carved with the cross of the Confederate veterans, that reads CAPT JOHN R FULLER, CO K, 9 SC RES, CSA. The 9th South Carolina Reserves was one of the state's reserve regiments raised for ninety days' service in the winter of 1862 and 1863. By every census John was eleven or twelve that winter. No service record for him has been found, and the marker may record the service of an older man of the same name.
About 1870, when he was about 19, John married Mary Elizabeth Moore. She was about 16. Her father, John Moore, was a farmer of Laurens County, and her mother was Zenora. Their first child, Samuel, was born about 1871.
By June 1880 John's father was dead. John, 30, was farming in Waterloo Township with Mary, 25, and four children: Samuel, 9, who was at school, Lizzie, 6, Green, 4, and a two year old the census taker wrote down as Write. That boy was Charles Wright Fuller, who went by his middle name as a child. John's widowed mother Edney, 50, lived in the next house with her grown children Nancy, Jones and Sally. His brother William, 26, lived in the house between them with his wife Amanda and six children. The three Fuller households stand one after another on the same page of the census.
In 1900 John and Mary were still in Waterloo, renting a farm. They had been married thirty years. Mary had borne ten children, and seven of them were alive. Five were still at home: Charles, 21, and Claude, 10, both working on the farm, Allie, 13, Burt, 8, and Guy, 5.
John later moved into the town of Laurens, the county seat. He fell ill with cancer of the liver late in 1922, and a doctor attended him from 5 January 1923. He died at Laurens on 15 March 1923, aged 72, and was buried the next day. His son Green Fuller, of Laurens, gave the details for the death certificate, naming John's parents as Granbury Fuller and Edna Nelson, both born in Laurens County. The undertakers were C. E. Kennedy and Son. Mary lived seven years more and died at Laurens in March 1930. They lie side by side in Northview Cemetery at Laurens under one stone, which gives his birth as 2 November 1849 and hers as 7 July 1854, with his Confederate marker beside it.
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Cite: Heirology, "John Ranson Fuller (1850-1923)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-ranson-fuller-1850-1923-54a9f5.