my great-great grandmother Nancy Manerva Jane Dupree Going by Fredrick Tucker

This is by Anna's distant cousin, resident of South Carolina: In observance of Women’s History Month, I salute my great-great grandmother Nancy Manerva Jane Dupree Going (1827-1903), pictured here at her Mount Joy community home in Union County, South Carolina in 1899. While four other photos of “Grandma Going” are known to exist, all of them projecting a clearer view of her countenance, I chose this one because it shows her rural environment, the only one she ever knew. As the eldest child—and only daughter—of her parents’ eleven documented children (one source indicates that there may have been four others, not counting Nancy’s two half-siblings from her mother’s previous marriage), Nancy knew firsthand the day-to-day efforts to survive as a part of farm family in the American South. During those hardscrabble days, she and her parents sought encouragement and solace in their faith. In fact, sixteen-year-old Nancy set an example for them, professing her belief in Christ, being baptized in the icy waters of the Pacolet River, and uniting with Pacolet Baptist Church (now known as Skull Shoals Baptist Church) in January 1844. Three months later her parents Griffin Dupree (c. 1795-1863) and Julia Ann Fielder Shaw Dupree (c. 1805-1884) were baptized in that same river. At twenty, Nancy married William “Billy” George Washington Going (1824-1915), himself one of eleven children, then finding his footing as an overseer on a neighboring farm. Soon Billy was financially secure enough to establish his own farm, with Nancy as his helpmate. By the time Billy enlisted in the Confederate States Army in 1863, the couple had become parents of eight surviving children, ranging in age from fourteen to one years old. In Billy’s absence, Nancy was left alone to run the farm. The feeling of isolation must have been tremendous. Nancy’s parents and all her siblings had migrated to Georgia in 1852. Her parents-in-law were dead, and Billy’s surviving brothers, save one, had also enlisted and left the county. This left her without a man in nearby range. As temporary head of the family, Nancy had to be more frugal than ever with what little money she had, as most of what Billy drew as income from the Confederacy was spent for his own needs. No letters from Nancy to Billy survive, but a few of his to her do exist, and from these we can learn a little about her situation managing the family farm. Billy wrote to her from Virginia on 15 June 1863: “I got $91.20 the other day. I paid $75.00 toward my horse. I hear that cows are selling at home from one hundred to two hundred dollars. I want you to take care of all your cows. Butter is selling here at three dollars per pound and two dollars per gallon for buttermilk and four dollars for a common chicken . . . I hope that you will get your wheat safe. Try to make all the corn you can and write how much molasses cane you planted and if you have the rice planted or not and plant all the best corn land in peas and I would like to hear from your garden. I hope that you will make a plenty to live on . . . if you need anything to live on you must buy it. Put you a shoat in the pen and see if you can’t make a fine hog out of it.” Courageously Nancy and her children endured the hardships of the war years. Billy once commended them in a letter home: “Tell all of the boys that it does me good that they are working so well this summer.” Billy was paroled at Appomattox on April 10, 1865, and like many other soldiers he made the long journey back to Union County, arriving around the 4th of July. Nancy, like many other strong and tough women in her community and state, had managed well to “keep body and soul together” during his absence. Little has been recorded about Nancy during postwar years. We know that she remained a faithful member of Skull Shoals Baptist Church until the 1877 organization of Mount Joy Baptist Church, constructed at Kelton, two and one-half miles west of her home. And we know that she still lived in a man’s world. Both married and unmarried women, particularly those with little or no education, were totally dependent on men, whether it be their husbands or fathers or brothers. In Nancy’s case, there were only two daughters to help with the typical women’s chores. In addition to cleaning, washing, cooking, milking, churning, spinning, weaving, sewing, and tending the kitchen garden and the chickens, Nancy also helped in the fields, especially during the fall season when every hand was needed to pick cotton. In 1880, Billy recorded that Nancy picked 184 pounds of cotton. He kept track of that figure so that the financial yield from her particular contribution could be issued to her for her own use. (Her eldest daughter Evelina picked 729 pounds that season.) This was probably the only time of the year in which these women were allotted income of their own. Nancy appears not to have spent a lot of her own money on niceties like store-bought yard goods. As you can see from this photograph, she—late in life—is still wearing homespun. Do you know what great amounts of time and energy were put into creating fabric at home? Here’s a clue. It took EIGHT hours of spinning to produce enough yarn to weave for ONE hour. And if you don’t know how spinning was accomplished, Google “great spinning wheel” to get an idea. I have and treasure two great wheels owned by Nancy and Evelina. Two years ago, I had the nicest one restored to functional condition. (No, I haven’t attempted to spin yet. I have distractions of which my ancestors never dreamed.) In 1900, Nancy boarded a train in Union bound for Greenville, South Carolina, to pay a rare visit at the home of her youngest son Oliver. There on Main Street, she sat for photographer J. C. Fitzgerald. It is the clearest image of “Grandma Going” that we have. Her lined face is careworn. Her left eye is covered with a cloudy film. Yet her chestnut-colored hair has very little gray in it. How do I know the color of her hair? I have a long lock of her thick hair, found inside an old family clock and labeled in my great-aunt’s handwriting. A rare treasure. Soon after her trip, Nancy’s health began to decline. Her son, Dr. J. Gary Going, wrote on July 15, 1903: “Mother is not doing very well. She has the skin trouble that she suffers with every summer.” The extent or nature of her other health problems is not known, but on October 7, Billy wrote to Oliver: “Mother are no better as yet . . . She is very sick today. She has bin sick ever sence you left here . . . she complaine of her breast and side. She says she very sick now.” Nancy lingered until the night of November 13, when she passed away at ten minutes past nine. “I know that dear old Granma went straight to Heaven,” her grandson Rev. Tom Going wrote in a letter twenty-five years later. Nancy was buried most fittingly on a Sunday in Mount Joy churchyard. At last her work was laid by. #MyAncestryStory by Fredrick Tucker