Thomas Dixon
Thomas Dixon lived in Holmes's militia district of Jasper County, Georgia. A Georgia county was divided into militia districts, each known by the name of its captain, and people were enrolled by district for musters, taxes and the state's land lotteries. Where he came from, when he was born and whom he married are not known.
He was the father of two daughters, America and Julia Ann. They were born about 1812 and by about 1813. The proof is a deed of 13 December 1834. In it the two sisters sold a lot of land in Coweta County described as "being the Tract or lot of Land Originally drawn & Granted to Thomas Dixon's Orphans of Holmes district Jasper County said Grant bearing date the Thirteenth day of May in the Year Eighteen Hundred & thirty four." Julia Ann Dixon and America, then the wife of Albert Beam, held that land outright and sold it with nobody else joining them. In the Georgia lotteries an orphans' draw belonged to the fatherless children registered under their dead father's name. So the deed names them as his orphans, and him as their father.
Georgia gave out its new lands by lottery. Families registered in their militia districts, and names were drawn against numbered lots. The children of a dead man were entitled to a draw of their own, entered together as his orphans. Thomas Dixon's orphans drew lot 61 in the sixth district of Coweta County, 202 1/2 acres, in the lottery of 1827. The grant was taken out in their names on 13 May 1834. Seven months later his daughters sold the lot to James E. P. Hunnicutt of Coweta County for three hundred dollars.
He was dead before his children were registered for that lottery. He was very probably the Thomas Dixon whose death a Jasper County coroner's jury examined on 19 June 1821. A coroner's inquest was held over a sudden or unexplained death. The coroner summoned a jury of men of the county, they viewed the body, and they gave a verdict on oath. This jury sat at the house of Isaac McClendon, and two of its members were also McClendons, Etheldred and Thomas. John M. Patrick was the coroner.
The record reads: "An inquest indented taken at the house of Isaac McClendon in this County the 19th of June in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and twenty one before me John M. Patrick Coroner for the said County upon the view of the body of Thomas Dixon then and there lying dead ... who being charged and sworn to inquire for the State of Georgia when and where how and after what manner the said Thomas Dixon came to his death upon their Oath say and present that he came to his death by the misfortune of his own intemperance (say the excessive use of ardent spirits)." The coroner signed it, and the foreman and jurors signed below.
Nothing written joins that inquest to the orphans' draw except the name and the county. But this is the only Thomas Dixon in the Jasper County records of 1810 to 1840, apart from tax rolls of the 1870s. He died in 1821, which would make his young children orphans for a lottery registered a few years later. America was then about nine.
No estate was opened for him. The Jasper County Court of Ordinary minutes from March 1821 to the middle of 1822 hold no letters of administration, appraisement or guardianship in his name, and neither does the book of administrators' and guardians' bonds, which runs to August 1821. A man who died this way may have left nothing to administer.
His wife is not known. An Amey H. Dixon of Jasper County, a daughter of Elizabeth Smith, appears among Elizabeth's heirs in 1830 and 1831, acting alone with no husband named. She could have been his widow, but nothing names her as his wife.
His daughter America married Albert Beam, had seven children, and died in 1847. In 1849 his daughter Julia Ann became guardian of her dead sister's seven orphans in Cherokee County, Georgia.
Children
Sources
If Thomas Dixon is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Thomas Dixon (d. 1821)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/thomas-dixon-1821-71ecbe.