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My name is Ann Pardue and I was born at Henrietta in Cheatham County in the state of Tennessee. Cheatham County was formed in 1856 from parts of Davidson, Dickson, Montgomery, and Robertson Counties. The earliest English settlement in what became Middle Tennessee was first settled in the watersheds of the Cumberland River in those counties. The first one, Kilgore's Station, was settled in early 1780 on Red River in present day Montgomery County several miles upstream from where it empties into the Cumberland River.

In 1785, not far from the Kilgore's Station settlement, a town was surveyed and laid out on the bluffs of the Cumberland by a twenty-one year old surveyor, Robert Weakley, Jr., at the request of Martin Armstrong, Surveyor General of the Cumberland Settlements, and was named Clarksville for the Revolutionary War General, George Rogers Clark. For his work, Robert Weakley, Jr. was given his choice of lots and built the first dwelling, a cabin, at the corner of present day Spring Street and Main Street which he sold in 1797 for twenty-five dollars as recorded in the book The Southern Virginia Weakly Families And Their Descendants, written and published by Samuel Anderson Weakley,

The Cumberland River played an integral part in the first half of the greater history of Middle Tennessee from the time of those first English settlements, including what  became Nashville.  A number of the poems of Pulitzer Prize winning poet and first Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Penn Warren, born in 1905, in Guthrie, Kentucky some twelve miles distant northeast of the public square in Clarksville, evoke the atmosphere of the Cumberland and its creeks, branches, and streams coursing through the hills and plateaus of that Upper Middle Tennessee geologic structure of the West Highland Rim where it joins the Kentucky line.  He once said he always felt more like a Tennessean than the native Kentuckian he was.

While some of my known kinfolk came to the Cumberland as early as 1784 - some twelve years before Tennessee became a state in 1796 - it was more than some thirty years later in or about the year 1815 before my Pardue ancestor, John Pardue, came to the Cumberland. In 1823 he acquired land on Dry Fork Creek in Robertson County which in 1856 became part of Cheatham County where his son, John, Jr., was a sitting justice in the new county's first court session.

The senior John was the second son of Joseph Pardue who died in Warren County, North Carolina in 1790. John was the grandson and namesake of John Pardue who died in 1769 in Bute County, North Carolina from which Warren County was formed in 1779. In 1761 the elder John sold his land in Amelia County, Virginia and moved south into Granville County, North Carolina from which Bute County was formed in 1764. In 1779 Bute County was discontinued and Warren and Franklin Counties were formed in its stead.

The earliest kinfolk bearing the Pardue surname had arrived in Middle Tennessee shortly after 1800 when Joseph's younger brother, Richard - recorded in the civil records of Montgomery County as Richard Perdue who was born sometime before May 1749 - came to the Cumberland by way of Anson County, North Carolina, Edgefield County, South Carolina, and Georgia, probably Richmond County, and settled on Big McAdoo Creek in Montgomery County. Richard died in Montgomery County in 1811 and by 1840 his sons, Howel and Jarret, named in his will, and a grandson, Joshua, had moved north into Indiana and Illinois, where clerks in the public records most often rendered the name Purdue, and many of Richard's descendants have continued the same spelling since those early days on that frontier.

Almost from the time I can remember I have been interested in the history of my family and absorbed and always loved the stories from the past of my family, as were told to me especially by both my grandmothers, and by my older aunts and uncles and other assorted older kin.  In the early 1970s taking advantage of an imposition upon my normal routine, brought about by a back injury, it seemed the time had come to finally begin a systematic effort to find the forebears of those ancestors whose stories I had not heard and haphazardly, at first, I began researching and compiling a history of my family.

Having been born and raised a Pardue, those first research efforts were concentrated on finding the parents of my Pardue great-grandfather, Robert Cooper Pardue, known as Bob. In true Southern fashion, I grew up knowing the names and some history as far back as all my other second great-grandparents, but, I knew nothing of the ancestry of great-grandfather Bob Pardue by which name he was always referred. 

The search began with a clipping from Nashville's mornng newspaper, The Tennessean,   found in a scrapbook of my Great Aunt Lizzie Rinehart, of a 1936 interview of Mary Pardue (nee Cain) on the occasion of a barbecue honoring her on her ninety-ninth birthday.  The wife of James Lafayette "Fate" Pardue, she was known as Aunt Mary "Fate" Pardue, and she was the sister-in-law of  my great-grandfather Bob Pardue. 

Mary "Fate" Pardue had been born in 1837 and was married before the Civil War.  Margaret Mitchell's best selling novel, Gone With The Wind, had been released just some two months before the 1936 interview and was still selling strongly, and may have been the impetus behind the reporter's lengthy questioning on her remembrance of the war and other events before the war. 

However, for me, the clipping contained important genealogical information in which she recalled much about her husband's maternal grandfather, Abner Gupton, who became the starting point for documented research on that distant Pardue branch of my family. While the interview did not provide the name of her husband's mother, knowing that her maiden name was Gupton, it was fortuitous that there was no small amount of public information available on her family, her father, Abner Gupton, born circa 1760 and died in August 1859 at the advanced age of about a hundred years. 

So began a concentrated journey further into the history of the branches of my family in which, combined with a love of history, I have come to know in some ways how my ancestors fitted into the times in which they lived and in the communities of which they were a part.  An interesting and rewarding journey for me, I hope that it is equally so for you on your journey into your family's history.


Genealogy is never done; it is always a work in progress!