Ancestors

Samuel W. Randles

Samuel W. Randles was born in Tennessee about 1817 and spent his life in Sevier County, in the foothills below the Smokies. By 1845 he was a deputy sheriff of the county, which in a hill county of that date meant riding out to serve papers and collect money that other people owed. It went badly. In December of that year the court gave judgment against him and against the four men who had signed his official bond, and one of them, James W. Ellis, paid the two hundred and eighty seven dollars himself and came back six years later to get it out of him.

He recovered. From the early 1860s into the 1870s he sat as a justice of the peace, trying debt warrants at his own house and signing the judgments himself, and the county court handed him one set of orphans after another to look after: the McCroskey children, the Erwin children, the Merritt children. His own household lost its mother early. His wife Virena Jane Hodges, a daughter of Edmond Hodges of Boyds Creek, died before the summer of 1860, leaving him six children between about four and sixteen, and by 1870 he and five of them were sharing a dwelling with a South Carolina family named Clark, which is what two households under one roof looked like where cash was short.

His middle initial is never written out. The name Wiley came into the family from his wife's brother and kept going: his son James Wiley Randles took his family out of the mountains to Mills County, Texas, and in 1886 named a boy Samuel W. Randles, and two later Sevier County men were buried as Samuel Wiley Randles, one at Seymour and one carried out to Colorado.

If Samuel W. Randles is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Samuel W. Randles (b. 1817)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/samuel-w-randles-1817-34f2cc.