Stacy Collins Sr.
Stacy Collins was born on 18 October 1786. The date is written in his family Bible, printed by Mathew Carey in Philadelphia in 1807. The family placed his birth at Spartanburg, South Carolina. A family query printed in 1968 put it more exactly: "near Spartanburg on the Tyger River, near Nazareth Ch." His parents are not known.
No record puts a family for him in Spartanburg. The only Collinses there in 1790 were John and Thomas. They belonged to the family of Thomas Collins Sr., Presbyterians who had taken up a large survey near Nazareth church on the Tyger. A county history of 1900 names old Thomas's sons as John, Richard, Joseph and William. There is no Stacy among them.
The one Collins family that fits him lived about 150 miles to the south. It was settled on Upper Three Runs, a creek running down to the Savannah River, in the county called Winton and later Barnwell District. Christopher, Joshua and Ann Collins all held land there between the 1780s and 1806.
His sister ties him to that creek. Family tradition says Stacy's sister Betsy Collins married Bennett Blackman, and that the Blackmans came to Mississippi in 1812. In 1804 South Carolina granted a Bennet Blackman 276 acres in Barnwell District "on Boggy Gut waters of the upper three Runs." Boggy Gut is the same branch where Joshua Collins and Nathaniel Ashley had bought 453 acres in 1800. A Bennet Blackman was living in Covington County, Mississippi, next to Stacy's own county, in 1820. No record names Blackman's wife. Even so, it is the strongest link between Stacy and the Upper Three Runs Collinses.
One woman there was the right age to be his mother. Ann Collins, "planter of Orangeburgh District," bought land from Charles Wheeler in October 1784. In October 1787, a year after Stacy was born, the Winton County court fined her for bastardy, the offence of bearing a child outside marriage. The entry names neither the child nor the father. In 1800 she headed a household in Barnwell District with no grown man in it. She was between 26 and 45, and she had three boys aged ten to sixteen. Stacy, then thirteen, would fit one of them. This is a possibility only. No record names his mother.
His male line has been tested. Y-DNA passes from father to son almost unchanged, so men of one male line carry the same pattern. A descendant of Stacy in the direct male line tested with FamilyTreeDNA, and his result stands alone in the Collins surname project. It matches none of the other 295 Collins men there. The Collins lines it was compared with, including the Nansemond County, Virginia, family that online trees name as his, belong to haplogroup R. His belongs to haplogroup I. If the tester's descent is sound, Stacy's father was not a man of any Collins family yet tested. That would fit a birth outside marriage to a Collins mother. It does not prove one.
He married Sarah Anderson in Georgia about 1807 or 1808. A memorial gives the date as 1 April 1808, in Twiggs County. She was a young widow; her first husband, a Gibson, had been killed a month after their wedding. By 1810 Stacy, Sarah and a Rachel Collins were members of the Stone Creek Baptist Church in Twiggs County. Who Rachel was is not known. Their four eldest children, Nancy, Sarah, Betsy and Vinson, were born in Georgia. They had fourteen children in all, from Nancy in 1809 to Edwin in 1840.
By 1816 the family was in Wayne County, Mississippi. They then settled on the Old Ridge Road near Ellisville, in the part of the country that became Jones County in 1826. When Jones County was organized he became its first tax assessor and collector. On 10 December 1845 he was commissioned captain of Company A, 23rd Regiment, Mississippi Militia. Both appointments are cited from the registers of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
On 5 January 1841 the United States issued a land patent to "Stacy Collins of Jones County, Mississippi" for 40.03 acres. A patent was the government's title to public land bought through a federal land office. On 7 August 1848 "Stacy Collins Senr" made a deed of gift to his son Edwin. The 1850 census found him in Jones County at 63, a South Carolinian, with his wife and his three youngest sons, Newton, Warren and Edwin.
On 19 April 1852 "Stacy Collins senr. & Sarah his wife" sold land to Joel E. Welborn and to Samuel E. Nettles. They are the last of his Mississippi records. That year he moved to Texas. His son Stacy Jr. took his own family in one ox wagon. Stacy and Sarah followed in another with Newton, Warren and Edwin. The trip took about twenty-five days. They settled near Honey Island in what became Hardin County. Edwin carried two poplar seedlings from Mississippi, and the one that lived gave the place its name, the Old Poplar Tree Place.
About a year after they arrived he fell ill with erysipelas, a spreading infection of the skin. A rider went thirty miles to Town Bluff to bring Dr. Work. There was no cemetery yet in the new county. He was buried on a pine hill, eight feet from the grave of Josiah Hendrix.
The year of his death is given three ways. His grandson V. A. Collins wrote that he died in 1853. His grave marker says 1855. An ancestor chart drawn in 1960 by Carr P. Collins Jr. gives 1858. The marker was set in August 1958, by V. A. Collins's account, when the heirs bought granite stones for the graves of Stacy, Sarah and Edwin. It stands in what is now the Collins Cemetery in Hardin County. It reads "Borned at Spartenburg S.C. Oct. 18, 1776 / Died in Hardin Co. in Day of 1855." The birth year on it is ten years earlier than the Bible and the 1850 census.
He did not live to see the Civil War. Most of his sons did, and nearly all of them refused to fight for the Confederacy. Stacy Jr., Newton and Warren hid out as deserters in the Big Thicket of Hardin County. In Mississippi, Simeon and Jasper joined Newton Knight's company of deserters in Jones County. Edwin, the youngest, died a Confederate soldier in January 1862.
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Cite: Heirology, "Stacy Collins Sr. (1786-1855)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/stacy-collins-sr-1786-1855-dd60e1.