Kitsie Ann Chancey Hutcheson (1818 - 1904)

let's begin with the oldest image we have of an ancestor of wjh...his great grandmother...kitsie ann.

this image is a rarity, it was nearly lost. a single copy existed, one faded photograph was in the possession of a granddaughter of kitsie ann's.  it sat in a box in a closet in wisconsin after her death and was almost tossed out.





kitsie ann died in 1904, when she was about 86 years old, several days after breaking a hip in a fall from a family wagon. she looks to be 80 years or so in this image which was probably taken sometime around 1900 give or take a few years.

look at her right hand.  even with the low resolution of the scanned image you can see the thickness and wear from years of work.  working fields, picking cotton, spinning and weaving and fashioning clothes, plucking chickens, sirring a pot over flames, boiling down hog fat and making soap, setting broken bones. 

and the face with her many wrinkles and deep deep lines.  there is a book of stories written in that face.

kitsie ann, a south carolina girl, born around 1818 to alexander and rhoda.  she migrated with her family and wagons and stock to southeast Alabama in the 1830's, a journey of 400 to 500 miles south and west, probably along the old federal road and crossings of  many rivers, streams and creeks, including the savannah, the oconee, the ocmulgee and finally the chattahoochee rivers.  the family settled in dale county, alabama near the west branch of the choctawhatchee river, in a community known today as bells crossroad. this is where she probably met and married sion hutcheson sometime in the 1840's.

she survived child birth, wilderness travel, a civil war that took her husband and lean seasons of hunger.  her children were dan, elizabeth, green, john, amanda and isabelle. wjh descended from her through her son john.