My family roots in Georgia includes the Sumner, Rooks, Pitts and Haman Families. The Sumner family extends to Joseph Chestnutt Sumner, who daughter Elizabeth married Isaac Rooks, their daughter, Mary Matilda Rooks married Alva Pinkney Haman and Charles Anderson Pitts. These are strong Southern family lines in Georgia. Georgia is a beautiful and scenic state. It is known for its peaches, peanuts and vidalia onions. Georgia is known as the Peach State. Its state flower is the Cherokee Rose, the state bird: Brown Thrasher, the state tree: Live Oak. Atlanta is its Capital.
Georgia History
Georgia was founded in 1732 as a trustee colony and was named for King George II of Great Britain. It became a royal colony in 1752. The colony originally prohibited slavery, a prohibition which lasted until 1749. Afterward, slavery grew in the colony, initially as labor for the coastal rice plantations.
The period after the revolution and before the civil war were years of population growth and economic prosperity. Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, driving Georgia and much of the South into a cotton-based economy. Seventy-three years after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Georgia seceded from the Union and joined other Southern states to form the Confederate States of America in February 1861. War erupted on April 12, 1861 and Georgia contributed nearly one hundred thousand soldiers to the war effort. In 1864, William T. Sherman’s armies invaded Georgia as part of the Atlanta Campaign; Sherman’s March to the Sea devastated a wide swath from Atlanta to Savannah in late 1864.
Genealogical Research
I have been researching my family’s surnames in the Georgia area since 2004. In the years of researching I found numerous websites that provide information that anyone might be able to use. I am researching the Buzbee’s (Ruskin and Riverview Buzbee’s), Sumner, Haman, Rooks and Pitts, all from the Arabi, Cordele area of Georgia. The Pitts family settled in Hillsborough County around 1920. Genealogy is my passion and I hope that my website will assist you in your search as it has in mine.