I am researching the genealogy of my paternal grandparents, Dr. Charles Catlett Johnson and Cecelia Elizabeth Ladeveze. My cousin, Judge C. Ellen Connally of Cleveland, Ohio and I are collaborating in this effort.
Dr. C. C. Johnson (b. 1860, d. 1928) was born in Orange County, Virginia. The photograph on this page may not show it well, but he had blond hair, blue eyes, was approximately 5'7" tall and weighed about 165 pounds. He graduated from Howard University Medical School in Washington, D.C. in 1888, and opened a medical practice soon afterward in Columbia, South Carolina. After the death of his first wife, Hattie Pearson, in 1902, he moved to Aiken, South Carolina where he married my grandmother and purchased a local pharmacy. He continued to practice medicine in an office in his drug store, while providing African American pharmacists an opportunity to practice their profession that would not have otherwise existed in the turn of the century South.
Dr. Johnson was also prominent in the Masonic Lodge, Prince Hall Affiliation, and was Grand Master of the State of South Carolina for 27 years. An accomplished orator, he often spoke at various lodges and other gatherings around the state, where he astonished those who didn't know him (and quite often even those who did) with his vast knowledge of Masonry and the fact that he had committed the entire Masonic ritual to memory.
In 1924, my grandfather attended the Ninth Annual World Sunday School Convention in Glasgow, Scotland. Clicking on the link will take you to my transcription of the notes he made on that trip.
As for family kinships, I suspect from my grandfather's middle name that we may be related to the Orange County and Culpeper County, Virginia Catletts, but I have found no definite connection so far.
We do know that his mother, Mary Jane Reed (b. 1836, d. 1916), was born in Orange County Virginia of Scottish parents, and we also know that his father, Lewis Johnson (d. 1860) was Irish. We know little else about him, except that family tradition paints him as a man who drank to excess. When Lewis died, Mary Jane married Nicholas Poindexter, a dark skinned black man, and lived in Washington, D. C. for a number of years. She died in Norwich, Connecticut. We believe there could have been as many as five children by Poindexter, but we can't be certain at this point.
My paternal grandmother, Cecelia Elizabeth Ladeveze (b. 1874, d. 1968), was born in Augusta, Georgia, but we have traced her roots back to Caroline Bouyer (b. 1807, d. 1852) of Santo Domingo, and Raymond Ladevéze (b. ca. 1782, d. 1838) of France.
We have followed her grandfather Raymond Ladevéze's journey from France during the time of the French Revolution to Haiti. In 1794, with the worsening of conditions during the Haitian Slave Rebellion, Raymond left Haiti for Charleston, South Carolina, and finally settled in Augusta, Georgia in about 1803.
We traced the migration of her grandmother, Caroline Bouyer, a mulatto of privileged class, from Cape Christopher, Santo Domingo in what is now the Dominican Republic, to Savannah, Georgia, then finally to Augusta, Georgia where she resided until her death.
Raymond and Caroline met in Augusta, married and had two children, Laura Frances Ladeveze (b. 1827, d. 1898) and Charles Augustus Ladeveze (b. ca. 1829, d. 1881), my grandmother Cecelia's father. Laura married Robert Augustus Harper (b. 1822, d. 1876) of Augusta and they had 11 children, 8 of whom survived. Charles married Mary Jane Wilson (d. 1926) of Augusta, and they also had 11 children, of whom 5 survived.
My grandmother, Cecelia E. Ladeveze Johnson, lived a quiet and unassuming life. She never voluntarily talked about herself, but over the years we discovered that she finished high school--a considerable achievement for a "girl of color," as she was considered in those days, despite her Caucasian features and fair skin--and even taught school for a time in her youth.
In her later years, as I remember her, she was fond of working in her flower garden, and known to have the most colorful yard in our neighborhood. She had a giant mulberry tree that stood in the center of her backyard (the bane of us kids when my mother saw our purple clothing), along with a fig tree and flowers along the fence line between our house and the little house next door occupied for a time by Dr. and Mrs. L. H. Harper. But plants weren't the only living things she looked after. As I was growing up, she kept chickens, which she would order by the boxfull as chicks from Nashville, Tennessee, to provide meat and eggs for the table. They would arrive about once a year by mail in a rather flat, ventilated box of about a hundred, if I remember correctly, most, miraculously, surviving the trip. And she kept ducks, as evidenced by the cement duck pond I grew up with at her house, though the ducks were long gone before my time, and I was accustomed to using their pond as a sand box. And while I'm on the subject of things living, my grandmother seemed to have a peculiarly profound understanding of nature that I greatly admired, even if I never quite understood it. For example, it always amazed me how she could call the particular fowl that would be that day's dinner and it would come to her without hesitation. Within seconds her dainty hand would be about its head and her small foot upon its body as she weilded the knife that would decapitate it. I, on the other hand, could call forever, and they would never come near me.
Our backyard was, indeed, a magical place to me in my youth, made even more so by the homemade laundry soap my grandmother would concoct there in an open iron kettle over the fire. "You! Boy! Get away from that pot!" she'd call out to me as a 3 or 4 year old if I became too curious. I had very early become accustomed to being called "boy," by the way, because she would usually resort to that rather colorless appelation when she needed me in a hurry, but not before quickly running through the names of her own male children one at a time in a vain attempt to remember my name, quite often to the point of becoming visibly frustrated. As if it were yesterday, I remember her calling "Lat, Pon, Charles, uh...boy!..."
Mama Cele, as we all called her, was a woman who had truly mastered the elements of 19th century survival, including the cast iron kitchen stove she preferred to use over a newly installed gas range, and a treadle sewing machine. She canned vegetables and fruit, as well, keeping our pantry full of Mason jars containing all sorts of goodies during the winter months. Hers, too, was the era of the ice cream churn and the icebox, and even though we had a modern refrigerator by the time I arrived on the scene, the old ice box remained in the corner, a grim reminder of earlier, more rustic times. On special occasions, when the house would fill to the brim with family and guests, and the sheer volume of food prepared overwhelmed our Frigidaire, I remember making trips to the ice house down the street to bring back ice in my wagon so that we could put that old icebox temporarily back in service. As for the churn, Mama Cele still used it on special occasions to make home-made ice cream when I was a boy.
From the earliest I remember, my grandmother was active in the Order of the Eastern Star, as well as in her church. Union Baptist in Augusta was the Ladeveze family church, and she continued her affiliation there as long as she was able. My father would take her the 17 miles to Augusta at least once a month to attend services, as I recall, and he would often take my sisters and me along.
Kind and gentle, it was from her that my father and his siblings inherited those traits. She often hummed or sang hymns aloud as she worked around the house. "Nearer My God to Thee" was a particular favorite, as were "Church in the Wildwood," and "Bringing in the Sheaves." But this quiet and unassuming woman had an indomitable spirit, in spite of her diminutive size (she stood less than 5 feet, and weighed less than 100 pounds) that made her a survivor. She became the cornerstone of the Johnson family after her husband's death, keeping the family together and managing the rental property he left her well, to her great credit. Mama Cele was truly the matriarch of the Johnson clan.
In spite of her small size and in testament to her great inner strength, Mama Cele had seven children, all of whom survived into adulthood. In order of birth, they were:
Cecelia Elizabeth Ladeveze Johnson left us in 1968, having outlived her beloved Dr. Johnson by one day less than forty years exactly.
There are now more than 400 names in our expanded tree, including the surnames Ladeveze (Ladevez, Veze), Carré (Carrie), Hope, Holmes, Harper, Cooke, Butts, Bouyer, Birnie, Simpson, Latimore, Davis, Duggins, McGhee, Connally, Wilson, Johnson, Poindexter, Stokes, Reed, Nelson, Osborne, Newton, Perry, Pearson, Jones, Kuter and many others.
I have recently published as complete a family tree as we have on my Family Tree Maker Website, which you may visit by clicking on the link.
I would appreciate hearing from any family member
with more information
on any
of these relatives or anyone else who feels we share a
common ancestry.
On May 24, 1984, Mary Harper Ingram and Cecelia Johnson McGhee visited Magnolia Cemetery (white) and Cedar Grove Cemetery (black) in Augusta, Georgia, both of which have plots of the Ladeveze and Harper clans. As they paused at graves of these two families, Mrs. Ingram, the Harper family historian, spoke into a cassette recorder, commenting on relationships and fleshing out family history for Mrs. McGhee. Judge C. Ellen Connally, niece of Mrs. McGhee, transcribed the taped conversation in July, 1997. What follows is a distillation I made on September 19, 1998 of:
In researching his paper, Professor Kousser profiled the Ladeveze and Harper families, since both played seminal roles in taking J. W. Cumming, James S. Harper and John C. Ladeveze vs. The County Board of Education of Richmond County, State of Georgia to the Supreme Court in 1899. This case, better known by the shorter Cumming vs. The Board of Education, was not a landmark case, but it did mark the first time an issue involving school segregation was considered by the highest court in the United States. I feel proud that two of the three names associated with the case are my relatives, and I can only imagine the courage it took for them to stand up to their social responsibilities at a time so close to the close of the Civil War.
From these two sources, I have pieced together the following historical brief on the origins of the Ladeveze family and how they came to be connected to the Harpers:
The Ladeveze story in this country begins with John Carrie (b. 1780, d. June 19, 1857), and Raymond Ladeveze (b. ca. 1782, d. 1838). 1 John was Raymond's uncle, in spite of there being only 2 years difference in their ages. When John was 12 and Raymond 10, their families sent them from their native France to Haiti to escape the horrors of the French Revolution. 2 That these families had the means to do this suggests they were most likely aristocrats. Shortly after their arrival in Haiti, however, Toussaint L'Ouverture's Slave Rebellion paralyzed the island (it began on August 22, 1791), and the boys once again found it expedient to move to an area of greater security--this time to the United States. They arrived, bags in hand, at Charleston, SC in about 1803, and remained there approximately eight years before moving inland to Augusta, GA. 3
In Augusta, John and Raymond met the four Bouyer girls (Mary, Laura, Amelia and Caroline). These winsome young ladies had been, according to Professor Kousser's findings, members of the mulatto upper class in Cape Christopher, Santo Domingo, and had arrived in the U.S. via Savannah before moving on to Augusta.4 Even though they imigrated from the same island, there is no record of John or Raymond having known the Bouyers before their meeting in Augusta. At any rate, in due time love blossomed, and there was talk of marriage, even though marriages between whites and people of color were illegal in Georgia at the time. Family tradition has it that John took Mary and Raymond took Caroline 5 across the Savannah River to a hamlet in South Carolina named Gooseneck, where interracial marriages were performed. The union, certainly, was not recognized by Georgia law, but the ceremony at least gave the participants the satisfaction of believing their marriages were sanctioned by God.
Mary and John had no children, but Raymond and Caroline, the younger of these two women, had two, Laura and Charles. Laura was two or three years older than Charles.
At this point, Professor Kousser's research led him to believe that Raymond was fed up with racial intolerance in the South and decided to take his children to New York, where he was able to provide them with enough education and wealth before his untimely death in 1838 to acquit them well when they returned to Augusta in the 1840s. In the North, Kousser writes, Charles was trained as a picture framer and cabinetmaker.
The Ingram/McGhee transcription states that when Laura and Charles were about 12 and 10, respectively, Raymond decided to take them back to France to have them educated there. Raymond never really liked America, according to family accounts, and especially disliked slavery, so he and the children left with a French party for New York to await passage to France. For some reason unknown to us now, there was a delay in leaving for France, and Raymond opened an art store on Chamberlin Street in New York. About this time there was a yellow fever epidemic in the New York area, and Raymond contracted the disease and died.
Charles remained in New York with friends and learned picture framing, while Laura made her way back to Augusta with a French group. Laura traveled as white so she wouldn't have to register in Charleston, as was the requirement for all free blacks coming south at that time. Back in Augusta, she was taken in by her Aunt Mary, the wife of John Carrie.
According to Mrs. Ingram, John Carrie was quite an entertainer. On Sundays, especially, he would have his French friends over to sit around a large table laden with Mary's excellent cooking, where they would eat their fill, then drink his wine and sing French songs. When John died, sorry to say, some of those same "friends" tried to take Mary's property under the pretext that John owed them money. Much to her relief, Charles Ladeveze and Robert Harper were able to save her property by having legal papers drawn up to protect her from spurious claims. John Carrie's property at the time extended from D'Antagnac Street to where C.T. Walker School now stands. There was a Carrie Street in Augusta as of the time I left the area, about 20 years ago, to give some idea of this man's prominence.
When Charles returned to Augusta, he opened an art store, going into business with his friend Robert Harper. As an aside, Robert's white father sent him to Boston before the Civil War where he studied music for six years. He returned to Augusta an accomplished musician and composer. Robert was such an extraordinary man, in fact, that he led a concert band composed entirely of white musicians during that especially sensitive era in race relations.
In the business, according to Mary Harper Ingram, Robert Harper made and tuned pianos, which he sold along with other musical instruments. He married Laura Ladeveze, Charles' sister, and Charles married Mary Jane Wilson.
Charles and Mary had eleven children, six of whom died at ages ranging from nine to about a year and a half. The oldest surviving child was John Carrie Ladeveze, and the youngest was my father's mother, Cecelia Elizabeth Ladeveze.
The Harpers also had eleven children, but lost only three: Mary Jane (named for Mary Jane Wilson), Laura Francis, and Charles Ladeveze Harper. The oldest surviving male child was Thomas Harper (Mary H. Ingram's grandfather), born in 1847. The next was Robert Harper, born in 1849, then James Harper, and finally Samuel Mitchell Harper. Of the surviving girls, Mattie followed James, and Carolina, Lola and Emma followed Samuel in that order. Laura's home was on the corner of Telfair and Jackson Streets, right across from the old Catholic Church, one block from the boyhood home of Woodrow Wilson.
There was a little brick house in Laura Ladeveze
Harper's backyard
that was probably a servant's quarters before Laura
bought the property. According to the daughter of
William Jefferson White, a prominent educator in the
black community of Augusta during the the period
right after the Civil War, this building was used by
him (White) as a schoolroom for young black ministers,
and this was the humble beginning of what later became
Morehouse College, now located in Atlanta,
Georgia.
2. The French Revolution began in 1789.
3. Spending "about 8 years" in Charleston and arriving in Augusta in 1803 would place their exodus from Haiti near the year 1794, during which year thousands of whites fled the island for the United States or France for three main reasons:
4. It is a matter of record that some Mulattoes during the time of the Slave Rebellion (and before) owned slaves. Those who did were caught up in the rebellion and were in as much danger of losing their lives as were white slave masters. There is no evidence at this point that the Bouyer girls were from a slave owning family, but owning plantations and slaves was the only logical path to elite status for mulattoes on the island, since they were barred from politics and the professions (such as law or medicine).
5. Caroline's name is alternately given as Carolina.
Last reviewed 25Nov15
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