Ancestors

Martha Ann Foshee

Martha Ann Foshee was born on 10 May 1844 in Georgia, the eldest child of Alexander H. Foshee, a Hall County, Georgia, man, and Evalina M. Merrell of North Carolina. The family moved back and forth across the corner where Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee meet, and her seven younger brothers and sisters were born on both sides of the state line.

In July 1860 she was 16 and living with her parents in the 1089th militia district of Dade County, Georgia, whose post office was Running Water, just over the Tennessee line. Her father was a farm laborer. James, Elijah, Perry Lee, Andrew, Frank and George were at home with her. The Foshees later farmed near Stevenson, Alabama, where both parents were buried in a family graveyard on the farm.

On 12 August 1865, just after the Civil War, she married John Calvin Shirley, who had come home from the Confederate army. In 1870 she was 25 and keeping house at Pleasant Grove, beat 7, in Jackson County, with John and their daughters Emma, 3, and Evaline, 1. By 1880 they had five children at home.

John died at Stevenson in July 1881, aged 37, leaving Martha a widow at 37 with young children. Her eldest, Emma Luona, married Robert Alexander McGraw at Stevenson the next year.

Her maiden name survives in a later record too. When her daughter Evaline St. Clair died at Chattanooga in 1938, the death record gave her mother as "Fahee", the way the informant spelled Foshee.

Martha Ann Foshee Shirley died at Stevenson on 2 May 1909, eight days before her sixty-fifth birthday. She is buried beside John in the Caperton Cemetery.

If Martha Ann Foshee is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Martha Ann Foshee (1844-1909)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/martha-ann-foshee-1844-1909-283f9c.