Giant Steps

A brief summary here might be helpful to bridge the mighty gaps between the generations thus covered. I realize I've run, rather than eased along the trails of the ancestors mentioned. Let me draw a quick path with words of the guys I'm linking in this chronicle.
First, in the early 1700s, there were Margaret Lynn and John Lewis in Staunton, Va. Then, along came Thomas Lewis, their son, who married Jane Strother. They produced, for one, Elizabeth Lewis who married Thomas Meriwether Gilmer, of Goosepond, GA.  A lot of territory grew between the lines of those characters, but I must move along.
George Rockingham Gilmer's book is a fascinating read if you like history. There are a few of his original books available for a hefty sum, but you have to search for them with collectors. I have a copy of the reprint, although I'm sure among the vast library we dispersed after selling the old family home there must have been an original. I do have a segment from the original book. It's a large print of five sketches of the families he mentioned in the first book. Just as an aside, George Rockingham Gilmer was the Governor of Georgia for two terms and he established the first white settlement in Atlanta when it was still Indian Territory.

His mother, Elizabeth Lewis Gilmer, has been at the center of the last few posts, but this is where I'll end her story. In the front of her bible, she recorded dates of births, deaths, marriages, with names, relationships, offspring. It is an incredible piece of history in itself, and while the cover of the book is in remarkable shape, the pages with writing are crumbling.

When Elizabeth became ill, she moved from Goosepond to Montgomery to the home of her daughter, Sophie Gilmer Bibb, and died at the Moulton Street home of her daughter and husband, Benajah S. Bibb. She is buried at the old Oakwood Cemetery in Montgomery.

From The Southern Times 1855:
"Not only was she full of years, but she was full of honors:--not such indeed, as ambition covets and fame bestows, but those other and better honors, which faith and virtue win on their ascending path to heaven. The three generations that were represented around her death-bed and her grave, bore within their hearts, a tribute to her excellence, that no worldly homage could approach. Amid their tears, she was committed to the tomb; and who that saw her sink into its embrace but felt, that the sod never rested more lightly on the bosom of departed worth or the shadows of the evening pointed toward a rising day of brighter glory!"

Her daughter, Sophie, leads the journey onward in the next post.