On This Site

Hardin Source Document Repository
Established by Bill Hardin
Maintained by Travis Hardin

New - Trav's Handy Bookmarks

New -  North Carolina Tips:
       ♦1790 Superdistricts
       ♦Early Orange County Districts    

♦Down Home in Cherokee and Etowah Counties, Alabama, and Floyd County, Georgia

♦Coosa, Georgia in the 1860s

♦Muster Roll of Company B, 31st Alabama Infantry (Confederate)

♦Letters from Confederate soldier Milton A. Hardin 1862-1863

♦Survey of Hardman Cemetery, Farill

♦Cherokee County precincts and georgaphical names

♦Floyd County militia districts

♦The George W. and Clementine Hardin Bible records

♦The Eli H. Hardin Bible records

♦The Aaron Hardin Bible records

Descendants of William T. Hardin of Tuscaloosa County, Alabama

♦Bluffton? Where is Bluffton?

♦Hardin Reunion 2005, Little Rock
and stories from J. Oran Hardin about the Mark Hardin family

Curiosities

Salisbury, North Carolina Booklist 1824

"Personally appeared before me Harry Alston and Morina Alston Freedmen and acknowledge that they have been cohabitating together as man and wife since 1837 and agree to continue as man and wife."
April 24th, 1866.         T.G. Horton CCC
(ancestry.com, viewed 12 July 2020)

Alabama Territory post-road situation 1819

A Southeastern Family

After drifting south from the Virginia coast over several generations, my branch of the Hardins settled on the Georgia-Alabama line in Cherokee County, Alabama, and Floyd County, Georgia just after the Cherokees were expelled.

My ancestors were the salt-of-the-earth types, the "backbone of America," and cannon fodder whenever they could not escape that fate. Three of my distant Hardin cousins were Confederate privates. Two of them died, while the family they left behind lost a father and two children in 1863, probably to some epidemic. My ancestor Samuel Story was conscripted in south Georgia as a private and was injured. He moved to Cherokee County, Alabama afterward. During Korea, two Hardin uncles of mine were killed. Beyond tragedy, the only fame I have so far encountered is that a distant uncle, James Asa Hardin, was particularly active in securing the consolidated school near Key and Forney, on the Centre-Cave Spring highway in Cherokee County, Alabama. The school, a junior high school, bore his name until it was abandoned, in the 1960's, I believe.

There's the tenuous Emma Sansom connection, Emma Samsom being a young woman from Gadsden, Alabama made into a Civil War heroine. "We're somehow kin to her," my mother used to say. Just a little, it turns out. She married Christopher Bullard Johnson, who was the great-grand uncle of my mother. Emma and Christopher Johnson moved to Texas.

My ancestors achieved another kind of fame  by having lots of children. Until the end of my grandfather's generation families of 10 and 12 were the norm for my ancestors. My grandmother Minnie Hardin who I never knew had nine children and died after self-aborting number 10. The generation born  after 1920 had far smaller families.

GED and pedigree of Travis Hardin on World Connect

This is a searchable and downloadable GEDCOM with footnotes, but note: No living people are listed.

Here is the tree that resided at a 2016 snapshot on the Wayback Machine.

In the old-style worldconnect my tree resided at https://wc.rootsweb.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=travhard. In the year 2020 WorldConnect the address takes you to a common entry point https://wc.rootsweb.com/ where you may input a Gedcom name, a Gedcom number, or a name which is then searched over thousands of like names in the entire WorldConnect project. Clicking on any of that will take you to a tree resembling the old WC site, showing about three generations per page. Links under names will allow you to jump to other names. While you can work out a way to copy what you see on the screen, I don't see a way to download a GEDCOM.

A differently-formatted tree is at Ancestry.com.
Hardin YDNA results and matching Hardin relative information is maintained at hhhdna.com, maintained by relative William Clark Hardin. For another source of DNA matches look up Hardin or Harden or any surname of interest at FamilyTreeDNA.com

The Hardins Oran and I come from are found by DNA testing to be of genotype I1, later called I-M253. Though I have not learned their British Isles ethnic group, the paternal line reaches back to Norse ancestors. I've taken the liberty of calling this related group  of which I am a member "Norse Hardins" since nearly all I1 Hardins so far tested are related in recent times. That sounds unusual. It suggests that only one man or only the closely-related descendants of one man were the only immigrant of this line to have come to North America from the British Isles. There are a few men with other surnames whose DNA is nearly identical to the Pendleton Hardins. Each of those cases will have an individual explanation: Adoption, extramarital event, and the like. Either that, or the DNA has been passed down nearly unchanged from generations that lived before the adoption of surnames -- an unlikely explanation since change happen more rapidly than that. For example, two living Plumnellies, second cousins with each other, have discovered that one has an SNP (single nucleotide polymorphism) that the other does not.

DNA TYPES

Minnie Mae Story: MTDNA Haplogroup H (from Jeana Dickerson)
George Frank Hardin: YDNA Haplogroup I-M253 (from Travis Hardin)
Lovia Lane: MTDNA Haplogroup K1c1b (from Travis Hardin)
William Ausie White through to Yancey White, father of James White: YDNA group R-M269, formerly known as r1b1b2 (from J.W. White)

Please read the notes and sources in my GEDCOM and the narratives here to determine what is proven and what is supposed. Some people and companies harvest any material that looks like a tree. The tree, accurate or not, becomes indisputable once it enters the collective. That is unfortunate, because I put on the Web trees I am working on. I intend to collaborate with other researchers especially where there are doubts and unknowns -- as there will be with non-remarkable families. I know of no other way to show proposed names and relationships for discussions than to put them on a Web site and  invite others to discuss via Web forums, mail lists, e-mail, and telephone whether they approve of my constructions, or if they have corrections for me.

Mystery 1917 and Other Photos from Farill, Cherokee County, Alabama

This mystery picture was made about 1917, likely at the Farill, Alabama Baptist church. Farill is in Cherokee County, Alabama, near the Georgia line. Many of my ancestors lived there from the 1860's. The girl at far left in the middle row with her head turned was identified by my aunt Katherine as Bertha May Hardin (1902-1987), who married Ed Smith in Birmingham. In the row in front of her, second person from the left, is Bertha's cousin Nessie LaVada Hardin (1907-1971), never married. The picture was in the possession of my grandfather Frank Hardin at his death. If you can identify anyone else, please contact me and I will caption the picture. Among the names in the area were: Hardin, Chandler, Bouchellon, Barkley, Story, Ingram, Smith, Isbel, Roe, Kirby,and Mormon.

Wonderful research! Your Hardin website is just so helpful and your research is very informative. --Susan Holman, Dallas, Tx. (March 2023, Hardin and Butler of McMinn County, Tenn.)

Very interesting reading. Intriguing and so well presented! Thank you so much for sharing your great HARDIN research and knowledge in such a practical informative way Travis! -- Laura Cram, 4 May 2020

"I have to say how impressive your research is. It answered a lot of questions for me." -- Suzanne Howe, 2019.

"You are one of the torchbearers in Hardin research now that Oran has passed." -- Ron Hardin, 11 Feb 2018.

"I do  keep tabs on your site postings and admire you for the consummate researcher that you are. You are very much aware of the need  to document your research and do a  most thorough job in doing so." -- Carl (Jim) Roache, 3 Jan 2018.

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My father's ancestors are Hardin and the other surnames at left above. My mother's ancestors are White, shown above right. Some of my ancestors surely took the same paths of migration as the Scots-Irish, who arrived in the 1700's at Eastern ports, usually Philadelphia. After living for a time in southern Pennsylvania or New Jersey or Maryland, they drifted south over several generations by way of Virginia, the western Carolinas, thence into Georgia and Alabama, and onward to Texas and points west. It is said that Staunton, Virginia is, even today, one of the most Scots-Irish cities in the United States. In the short term the I-M253 Hardins were English who settled in tidewater Virginia.. In the long term the haplotype I1a Hardin group came from the Scandanavian Vikings, according to the haplogroup maps.

My Hardin branch, first found in Brunswick County, Virginia, drifted through North Carolina. Gabriel settled in Pendleton District, South Carolina and a set of his grandchildren settled on the Georgia-Alabama line in Cherokee County, Alabama, and in Floyd County, Georgia in the late 1830s, just after the Cherokees were expelled. The White family ancestors lived in Hokes Bluff, Alabama from Paulding County, Georgia after arriving from Pendleton District, South Carolina. The Lanes were from Piedmont, Alabama. The family of Hardins living astraddle the state line was given the shortcut name "Plumnelly Hardins" by Hardin Family Association founder Oran Hardin, because they were said to be "plum out of Alabama and nea'ly out of Georgia," in the old-fashioned manner of speaking. Oran Hardin called himself a Plumnelly, though his family came not to Cherokee County but to Marshall County, Alabama -- near the Tennessee River -- by way of Tennessee. The pertinent DNA of Oran Hardin and of the Plumnellies is identical. (See  the light green group at hhhdna.com for DNA testing results.)