Having always been a huge fan of history, the history of my family interested me. Then one day when my father was cleaning out my grandparent’s house after their passing, he came across a pair of books that blew me away. The first was printed in 1916 by Jasper E. Bynum and was called The History of the Bynum Family. The other was printed in 1958 and was called Historical Sketches of the Bynum Family.
These two books supplied a wide range of information on my family’s history. Stories ranged from family moving out west to Texas from Alabama to stories of my ancestors fighting in the Civil War. There were so many cool things to read and learn about as far as life in the late 19th to early 20th century.
In response to this, I found a reunion, called the Four Families Reunion, in Oneota, Alabama. This reunion was formed many decades ago with one of the four families being the Bynums. While I have never been, my father went nearly a decade ago as he started researching into both his grandmother’s (Burns) and father’s (Bynum) side of the family. And he has put together some history of our family.
My father started off with his grandfather, Gurley McCoy Bynum, and began researching into his life and ancestors. He found a few really interesting tidbits too. Gurley McCoy’s great grandfather, Asa, was born in 1781 in North Carolina. He was a primitive Baptist preacher, and he and his wife Rebecca had at least one slave, a cook. Apparently after Asa died a few outhouses burned down near their house. Turns out it was a slave cook who filled a coffee pot full of hot coals and thew it on the buildings. The cook was taken to a nearby county and sold.
One of Asa’s sons was Daniel born in 1817 in South Carolina. One of Daniel’s sons was Uriah, who was kicked by a horse and died in 1897 at the age of 49. Uriah’s older brother James died in the service of the Confederate Army in 1865 at the age of 23.
Eventually the family moved to Blount County, Alabama which is where Gurley McCoy, my father’s grandfather, was born in 1879. There he married Minnie Sophia Burns, my great-great-grandmother. Gurley McCoy, like many of the men in his family before him, was a traveling preacher. He was a Methodist preacher who spent most of his time in Alabama. That was something that ran strong in my family’s history, and still does today as my cousin is a Methodist minister in Maryland.
There are so many great stories in those two books. Even though one was just a big family tree of the four families, I always thought it was interesting that the last entry was my father. My father passed those books onto his older brother, but the Blount County Library in Alabama does have copies. One of my goals in the near future is to digitize those stories in order to share them with more of our family members. There is still a lot to be learned about my family’s past, but that will be part of the fun – research.
*Most of this data was taken from research my father has done over the years and saved.