Hooper

My great-great-grandfather Rev. Nicholas A. Anthony (1844-1893) married Emma Hooper (1849-1886) in Tuscumbia, Alabama about 1869.   Thanks to inspiration from Anne Goodwin and her Hooper Compass, I was able to backtrack another generation before “hitting the wall”.

How Emma Hooper’s grandfather William Hooper fits into the family is not at all clear.  In an effort to understand the possibilities, I starting piecing together Hooper records that probably relate to his lineage.


Some Hooper & Hooper-Related Records

Hooper Records in Virginia’s Northern Neck pertaining to the family of Thomas Hooper (c1680-1724)

Some Hooper Records in back-country South Carolina and Florida

Hooper Records in Tennessee

Records pertaining to James Hollis in Virginia and Tennessee (in process, Tennessee records are incomplete)


My Hooper connection

Emma Hooper, the only daughter of Burrell Young Hooper, married a Methodist minister from Tennessee named Nicholas Anthony.  After Emma’s untimely death in Tennessee their oldest son, 15-year old Edward Young Anthony, ran away from home, never to return.  He eventually acquired a medical degree and became the town doctor in a small Texas town but never mentioned or contacted his estranged family in Tennessee.  My father was the only child of Dr. Anthony’s only child and was born and raised in the Anthony home in Omaha, Texas.  More than thirty years after Dr. Anthony’s death, my late father and I set out to use what clues we could find to identify Edward Young Anthony’s parents.  We were eventually successful, but knew nothing of Emma Hooper’s background until a few years ago.

The catalyst of my renewed interest was one of those odd genealogical coincidences we sometimes uncover.  I found a letter written in 1848 by my great-great-grandfather George Washington Baird describing being hired to guide Emma Hooper’s parents and grandmother from Springfield, Tennessee to their new home in Tuscumbia, Alabama.  George Baird returned to Tennessee and the following year moved to Texas.  More than sixty years later George Baird’s grandson and Burrell Hooper’s great-granddaughter met and married in a small Texas town and produced my father.