Working backwards from me: the Nichols side

This undated photograph is of Horace Thomas Nichols, my mother's father. He brought his family to Richmond from Southwest Virginia because that's where his job with the C&O Railway brought him. He was born in 1886 and died in 1952, when I was 9.

To borrow from the title of Dorothy Allison's 1992 book, there's a bastard out of Carolina who played an important role on my mother's side of the family, the Nicholses. But more about him shortly.

I can trace the Nichols side of the family as far back as 1790, to Pasquotank County, N.C. Pasquotank is now part of the Elizabeth City Micropolitan Statistical Area, and it's in the northeast corner of North Carolina, on the Atlantic Coast. Benjamin must have been something of a pioneer, because a year later he shows up in Surry County, N.C. Surry County, in northwest North Carolina, had existed as a geographic entity for only 20 years. It's 14 counties west of Elizabeth City, and hugs the border right below Grayson County, Va. Benjamin Nichols was essentially then living on the edge of the country's western frontier. Benjamin Nichols was my great-great-great-great-grandfather.

In 1791, the same year he arrived in Surry County, he married Elizabeth Miers. I know nothing further about her. But Benjamin and his wife and their children appear to have lived in Surry County until their deaths. Their part of Surry County became part of Yadkin County (named for the river) in 1850.

Benjamin and Elizabeth Nichols had a daughter, also called Elizabeth, my great-great-great-grandmother, whose exact dates are unknown. We do know that although she never married, she bore a son in August of 1828 and gave him the name Asay Columbus Nichols. Asay, who was my great-great-grandfather, was the man who saved the name in that branch of the Nichols family: He's the bastard out of Carolina in my family tree. For had his mother, Elizabeth, been married, her son would not have been a Nichols. He would have borne his father's last name and not his mother's.

I don't know what the attitude was toward illegitimacy in Yadkin County in the early 1800s, but my guess is that it was different from the ideas that came later with the Victorians and that persist in many ways today. Civilization on what was then near the country's frontier brought one into close daily contact with the cycle of life, from farm animals to human beings. It is clear that my great-great-great-grandmother was not shunned and was kept in the family fold with her bastard son.

When he was 23, Asay Columbus Nichols married Martha "Patsy" Head on the last day of 1851. Asay and Patsy had six children and then moved across the border to Grayson County, Va., where they had three more children. The last of their children born in Yadkin County was Ace McClellen Nichols. His birth came in 1865, the last year of the Civil War. Ace was my great-grandfather. At some point between late 1865 and 1868 they moved to Virginia.

Ace married for the first time in Grayson County, but the marriage date is unknown. He and his new wife, Charlotte Matilda Delp, had two sons, Horace Thomas Nichols and Benjamin Nichols. Horace was my grandfather, born in 1886. His younger brother, Benjamin, was born four years later. When Horace was just 6 and Benjamin only 2, Charlotte Nichols died leaving Ace a widower. It took him three years to find another wife, Della Ward. Ace and Della had no children and divorced quickly. In April 1898, Ace married his ex-wife's younger sister, Laura Novella Ward, and the two had a daughter named Jinnie, born in 1899.

Ace McClellen Nichols and third-wife Laura appear in the 1910 U.S. census living in Washington County, Va. Washington County is one county farther west of Grayson County, very close to the southwest tip of Virginia, with Abingdon as its county seat. Ace and Laura and the children had moved to Washington County, however, at least by 1906, because it was there and then that his son Horace met and married my grandmother Louella Williams when she was 14 and he was 20. Granny and Grampa Nichols had six children, five of whom survived childhood. They were Annie, Mary Helen (my mother), Joseph, Louise and Hazel.

My grandfather escaped from a life of either subsistence farming or working in the Southwest Virginia coal mines by getting a job with the C&O Railway. He stayed with the company until he retired in the 1940s.

My grandfather Horace Nichols died at the age of 66 on March 16, 1952, when I was 9. Granny lived until Dec. 9, 1985.

Their daughter Mary Helen, born in 1914 in Green Springs, Va., was my mother. Green Springs is in Louisa County in central Virginia. Granny and Grampa Nichols had moved east as he moved up with the railroad company. Along the way they had lived for a time in Gordonsville, also in Louisa County. By the early 1920s, they were living on Carrington Street in Richmond, just up the hill from the C&O Railway headquarters.

My mother, Mary Helen Nichols, married my father (his third marriage) on Sept. 6, 1941. I was born Sept. 11, 1942. My sister, Dianne Christine Dale, was born after my dad returned from World War II in the Pacific in the Navy. Her birthday was March 8, 1946.

Dianne died Feb. 9, 2005, of cardiac arrest just as she'd stepped out of her morning shower. Neither of us ever married, and neither of us had children.

My mother was the last of her siblings to die, on July 27, 2007. I do not know the date of death of her eldest sister, Annie, but it was in the 1990s, if memory serves. Married twice, she had no children. Joseph lived to be 65 and died on Christmas Day 1981. He and his wife, Lillian, had no children. Louise married Frank Call and the couple had five daughters. Frank had also spent his career working for the C&O Railway. He died at the age of 84 in 1994. Louise died July 22, 2003. In addition to her five daughters, her obituary listed four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Hazel, the youngest of my mother's sisters, married late in life. Her husband, Hubert Barklage, spent his career in the U.S. Army, and for a time they lived in Alaska and in Tacoma, Wash. They were headed to Virginia by car when they had an accident in Saluda, Mo., in 1994. Hubert was killed instantly, and Hazel died shortly thereafter of injuries from the crash. They had no children.

My Uncle Joe Nichols was thus the last in his line to bear the Nichols name.