Since I was born, I have had a pea-sized bald spot above my right ear. If my hair is cut close enough it is obvious. I say it is my mini-solar panel absorbing and storing power. The reality is it is a reminder of how fortunate I am to be alive. The scar was left from an infection caused by an overproduction of insulin when I was born. An internal monitor was placed on the right side of my head while my mother was in labor. After birth and incubation— small enough to fit in my mother’s hand—I made a quick recovery. At 2:11 PM, nearly a month and a half premature, I was born at Brook Army Medical Center (Fort Sam Houston) in 1983.
DNA evidence from 2009 provides that the probability of paternal parentage to Alvin L. Hardaway is 99.9999938%, challenging my original birth record that indicates my mother's first husband as my father. Of course, this was known all along, but it was the DNA-science that substantiated the facts. My mother and father’s other son together, and named Gregory, was born without incident in 1984.
My father’s paternal grandparents, Pleas and Adam Hardaway, were formerly enslaved and are strongly hypothesized as to have been owned by two prominent Louisiana statesmen (John Perkins Sr. and John Perkins Jr.) from at least 1857 to the onset of the Civil War. Adam can be found in 1867 in Gonzales County, TX, when he was registered as a “colored voter". Meanwhile, my mother’s maternal great-great-great grandparents, Pauline Riddle (nee Christy) and Homer Cornelius Vaughan, enslaved many black-Americans on a tobacco plantation in Randolph County, MO. This was until the outbreak of the war in which their son William Moten Vaughan fought on the side of the Confederacy against the efforts of Mom’s paternal great-great grandfather, John M. Stanley, who fought for the Union. It is with this research report that I claim a family name rich in heritage, but robbed of me by circumstance and muddled by history. I officially took on the Hardaway surname in December of 2009.
After 22 years, I reunited with my father on 22 JUL 2007 in Seattle, WA. He had been honorably discharged in Seattle in 1998 as a Staff Sergeant (P). My brother and I are his only two children. On some level it might have been enough to reunite with my biological father. But reuniting with him made me wonder more about how we got to that point at the SeaTac Airport when a 22-year absence closed on itself like an airliner’s pressurized door before takeoff. It instantly became about learning and wondering everything possible about my line of black-American ancestors that toiled, suffered, triumphed, and survived.
Along the path of learning I grew increasingly fascinated by the stories and the myths of the people whose histories were inextricably linked to my own existence. Then I wrote down my findings—much to my relative’s chagrin—if I can use that word. I made some remarkable discoveries you will read about in my reports and on this site. And while I do not intend to rewrite the lives of our ancestors, I do wish to give you a frame from which to build your own opinions. Still though, I will not hold back that this is the history that I believe in my heart. It is a history that comes from a plethora of source material and oral histories, and ultimately keeps to the genealogical proof standard. And though, if not for my father, this is the history that makes me a Hardaway—and it will forever change in some ways so long there are Hardaways alive to add to it. This research truly is my magnum opus. It is important to understand that there may be instances in this report where you find yourself imposing your own viewpoint on what you conceptualize as your ancestor’s perfect life, or even life of strife—I know I did. But because we are so far removed from our ancestral past, the horrors we refuse to think of ever happening to our relatives could in fact be the paths their lives took (or not). And that says nothing of the degree of horror which in it of itself bares consideration. It is in those horrifying places that our spirit butts up to the sacred memory and value systems set in place today that were given to us down through the lineage. So, by proxy there is a self-learning in the research—a way of returning to one’s authentic self—and thus honoring those who came before.
Some will choose to set the research down, to forget it, not finding relevant application, but others will choose the opposite, in keeping those who came before alive as an afterglow. Keep an open mind to the research presented in this report, write down questions of your own, and then investigate them. You too are certainly part of this history
DNA evidence from 2009 provides that the probability of paternal parentage to Alvin L. Hardaway is 99.9999938%, challenging my original birth record that indicates my mother's first husband as my father. Of course, this was known all along, but it was the DNA-science that substantiated the facts. My mother and father’s other son together, and named Gregory, was born without incident in 1984.
My father’s paternal grandparents, Pleas and Adam Hardaway, were formerly enslaved and are strongly hypothesized as to have been owned by two prominent Louisiana statesmen (John Perkins Sr. and John Perkins Jr.) from at least 1857 to the onset of the Civil War. Adam can be found in 1867 in Gonzales County, TX, when he was registered as a “colored voter". Meanwhile, my mother’s maternal great-great-great grandparents, Pauline Riddle (nee Christy) and Homer Cornelius Vaughan, enslaved many black-Americans on a tobacco plantation in Randolph County, MO. This was until the outbreak of the war in which their son William Moten Vaughan fought on the side of the Confederacy against the efforts of Mom’s paternal great-great grandfather, John M. Stanley, who fought for the Union. It is with this research report that I claim a family name rich in heritage, but robbed of me by circumstance and muddled by history. I officially took on the Hardaway surname in December of 2009.
After 22 years, I reunited with my father on 22 JUL 2007 in Seattle, WA. He had been honorably discharged in Seattle in 1998 as a Staff Sergeant (P). My brother and I are his only two children. On some level it might have been enough to reunite with my biological father. But reuniting with him made me wonder more about how we got to that point at the SeaTac Airport when a 22-year absence closed on itself like an airliner’s pressurized door before takeoff. It instantly became about learning and wondering everything possible about my line of black-American ancestors that toiled, suffered, triumphed, and survived.
Along the path of learning I grew increasingly fascinated by the stories and the myths of the people whose histories were inextricably linked to my own existence. Then I wrote down my findings—much to my relative’s chagrin—if I can use that word. I made some remarkable discoveries you will read about in my reports and on this site. And while I do not intend to rewrite the lives of our ancestors, I do wish to give you a frame from which to build your own opinions. Still though, I will not hold back that this is the history that I believe in my heart. It is a history that comes from a plethora of source material and oral histories, and ultimately keeps to the genealogical proof standard. And though, if not for my father, this is the history that makes me a Hardaway—and it will forever change in some ways so long there are Hardaways alive to add to it. This research truly is my magnum opus. It is important to understand that there may be instances in this report where you find yourself imposing your own viewpoint on what you conceptualize as your ancestor’s perfect life, or even life of strife—I know I did. But because we are so far removed from our ancestral past, the horrors we refuse to think of ever happening to our relatives could in fact be the paths their lives took (or not). And that says nothing of the degree of horror which in it of itself bares consideration. It is in those horrifying places that our spirit butts up to the sacred memory and value systems set in place today that were given to us down through the lineage. So, by proxy there is a self-learning in the research—a way of returning to one’s authentic self—and thus honoring those who came before.
Some will choose to set the research down, to forget it, not finding relevant application, but others will choose the opposite, in keeping those who came before alive as an afterglow. Keep an open mind to the research presented in this report, write down questions of your own, and then investigate them. You too are certainly part of this history
OUT OF THE ANTEBELLUM HAZE
It really isn’t a town at all. Its memory buried with its citizens long ago. The rural community of Belmont sleeps in western Gonzales County, between its county seat and Seguin, TX. It came to be in the 1840s as a stagecoach stop named Centerville. When citizens of the area applied for a post office, and found the name Centerville taken, they chose Belmont for the Belmont-family of horse-racing fame. Today there is a faint resurgence, or rather preservation of its few historic buildings that stand otherworldly against a small tapestry of modern places of business, a single traffic light, and a sparkling new gas station.
Near the crux of Highway 90 and State Highway 80 lies a cemetery which bares the town’s name. It sits in front of a chicken hatchery, whose stench borders on unbearable and wafts through the chain link fence surrounding the site. But, meandering through the sacred ground just as the sun begins to pitch below the horizon, one can see it standing with a certain pride and dignity.
Muhlenburg Hogan Beaty’s headstone is not as garish as other relative’s related to him. For some time, it has resisted the temptation to sink beneath the sandy soil as so many other graves in the Belmont Cemetery have done, their memory slipping into oblivion. The record says that Mr. M. H. Beaty was born 06 OCT 1806 in Lee County, VA, and died in Belmont, TX, on 27 APR 1871, aged 65. However, his significance is not so much that he was the son of U. S. Senator Martin Beaty, that he served as postmaster for Belmont during the 1850s, or that he was a successful farmer. It is that he was Assistant Marshal to the Gonzales County Census of 1870 that brought him face to face with Pleasant and Adam Hardaway, and their nine children.
Pleas and Adam’s children, and their children, inherited a name which resounded throughout Gonzales County, TX, for at least the next century. Some of them would be lost in the muck of history, or removed toward Dallas, or catapulted themselves toward the west coast and beyond, while others still would rewrite their own beginnings all together. But maybe—just maybe—this 1870-record, in tandem with other research, provides a bridge to the past, allowing us to visit their world and take back those relics of fortitude and heart that we might live our own lives on the front foot.
Ultimately, Pleas and Adam represent the two individuals from which The Hardaways of Gonzales County, Texas, can trace the genesis of their lineage. As more archival material comes to light, so too will the opportunity for research and learning. Yet simultaneously, history cannot be reduced to the mere black and white record. We do not know the way it was. History in this case is certainly something more unpredictable, hazy, and chameleon-like. -Andrew R. Hardaway
Near the crux of Highway 90 and State Highway 80 lies a cemetery which bares the town’s name. It sits in front of a chicken hatchery, whose stench borders on unbearable and wafts through the chain link fence surrounding the site. But, meandering through the sacred ground just as the sun begins to pitch below the horizon, one can see it standing with a certain pride and dignity.
Muhlenburg Hogan Beaty’s headstone is not as garish as other relative’s related to him. For some time, it has resisted the temptation to sink beneath the sandy soil as so many other graves in the Belmont Cemetery have done, their memory slipping into oblivion. The record says that Mr. M. H. Beaty was born 06 OCT 1806 in Lee County, VA, and died in Belmont, TX, on 27 APR 1871, aged 65. However, his significance is not so much that he was the son of U. S. Senator Martin Beaty, that he served as postmaster for Belmont during the 1850s, or that he was a successful farmer. It is that he was Assistant Marshal to the Gonzales County Census of 1870 that brought him face to face with Pleasant and Adam Hardaway, and their nine children.
Pleas and Adam’s children, and their children, inherited a name which resounded throughout Gonzales County, TX, for at least the next century. Some of them would be lost in the muck of history, or removed toward Dallas, or catapulted themselves toward the west coast and beyond, while others still would rewrite their own beginnings all together. But maybe—just maybe—this 1870-record, in tandem with other research, provides a bridge to the past, allowing us to visit their world and take back those relics of fortitude and heart that we might live our own lives on the front foot.
Ultimately, Pleas and Adam represent the two individuals from which The Hardaways of Gonzales County, Texas, can trace the genesis of their lineage. As more archival material comes to light, so too will the opportunity for research and learning. Yet simultaneously, history cannot be reduced to the mere black and white record. We do not know the way it was. History in this case is certainly something more unpredictable, hazy, and chameleon-like. -Andrew R. Hardaway