Chapter 1: The Virginia Soil – Birth in a Time of Empire

The Thomases were working-class farmers—people of the soil and simple faith, not the gentry. Their lives were shaped by toil, worship, and tight-knit community. The town of Culpeper Courthouse was a growing hub, and Joel’s childhood echoed with the rising voices of colonial unrest.

In 1775, at just thirteen, Joel lost his father—the same year the Revolutionary War erupted at Lexington and Concord. Like many boys of that time, he likely stepped into adult responsibilities quickly. Later, he enlisted in Captain Vernon’s Company from North Carolina, joining countless young men who traded farm tools for muskets in pursuit of independence.

Chapter 2: Edge of a New World – Georgia and the Thomas Legacy

Following the war, Joel sought more than survival—he sought land. With few opportunities in Virginia, he joined the post-war migration southward to Georgia, a newly opened frontier promising fertile acreage. By the early 1790s, Joel had settled in Elbert County, claiming 100 acres along the Savannah River and 200 more in Franklin County near Hudson’s River.

These were not just land deeds—they were the embodiment of ambition and security. At some point, Joel married Mary Jessie Carruthers, likely the daughter of a fellow settler. In 1791, their daughter Susannah was born—a child of Virginian roots and Georgian soil.

Life on the frontier was demanding: every cabin board and plowed field a testament to human endurance. Whether Joel earned his land through service or purchase, it reflected vision. He was building a legacy—one that would soon pass to others sooner than expected.

Chapter 3: A Daughter’s Path – Susannah Thomas and the Southern Legacy

In the fall of 1793, the probate records of Elbert County, Georgia, marked the passing of Joel Thomas. He was just thirty-one years old. For the court, it was a legal matter—land to be measured, administrators appointed. For his widow Mary Jessie and their young daughter Susannah, it was a rupture.

Susannah Thomas was barely two years old when her father died. Too young to remember his voice or the feel of his arms, she would grow up knowing him only through the land he left behind and the stories her mother preserved. What Mary Jessie faced in the aftermath was the frontier reality of widowhood: survival without protection, strength without applause.

And so, in the red clay country of early Georgia, a new kind of legacy took root—not through title or fortune, but through endurance. Mary Jessie, widowed and in her mid-twenties, stayed close to the land they had settled. There is no record of her remarrying right away. She raised Susannah with the help of neighbors, kin, and sheer will—keeping her daughter clothed, fed, and rooted in the soil that Joel had claimed.

Susannah came of age in a Georgia still raw from revolution, where towns were young and church bells new. On December 24, 1807, at about sixteen years old, she married Isaac Alexander in Franklin County. Their union marked the beginning of a long journey—a journey that would carry Susannah westward, beyond the borders of her father's legacy, into a new chapter of American expansion.

By the 1820s, Susannah and Isaac had migrated to Mississippi, joining a wave of settlers drawn by fertile land and opportunity. In 1828, their son Andrew J. Alexander was born there—a new generation planted in yet another state’s soil. From Georgia’s early statehood to Mississippi’s rising frontier, Susannah embodied the American spirit of movement and resilience.

She lived through the early stirrings of statehood, the rise of cotton culture, and the tremors of a country inching toward civil war. By the time she died, sometime before 1850 in Simpson County, Mississippi, the South had begun its transformation—and she had witnessed it all from the hearths of homesteads, the porches of log cabins, and the fields of quiet labor.

There are no personal letters from Susannah, no preserved journals. But her life is etched in the census rolls, marriage ledgers, and the lineage of those who followed. She was an early Georgia settler, a Mississippi pioneer, and a matriarch whose choices echoed through generations.

Her quiet strength carried her from the red earth of Elbert County to the river-fed fields of Simpson County. Through her, Joel’s legacy endured—not as a name etched in stone, but as life lived forward: in marriages, births, migrations, and memory.

Today, her descendants carry the blood of pioneers—men and women who cleared forests, tilled land, and endured. Joel and Mary Jessie planted the seed. Susannah carried it across state lines. That, too, is a legacy.