Joel Disaker “Papa Joe” Jones (1861-1946). He married Sarah Louvenia “Mama Lou” Norris (1868-1965) in 1889. Her parents were Franklin Marion Norris and Virginia Ann Buckalew. "Papa Joe" Jones was a civil engineer and journalist. He is pictured to the left practicing his journalistic trade at the typewriter. He liked family history and both researched it and wrote about it. He had a weekly column in the Democrat Reporter at Linden, Alabama. (mccr/mccr2.jpg). Click here for an example of his writing about the Jones migration to Alabama in the 1830s. Papa Joe’s granddaughter, Shirley Jones McCreedy, has collected about 1000 of his articles and had them bound in three volumes. A copy is at the Alabama State Archives in Montgomery. Eventually these articles need to be put on-line. They deal not only with Jones family history, but with every aspect of Alabama history, including Alabama animal life, hunting, churches, schools, baseball, bootleggers, Cajuns, camp hunts, Christmas, much about the Civil War, cotton, dances, divorce, drunks, early life in Alabama, earthquakes, epileptic goats, fish camps, forests, early French and English forts, much about Indian life when the whites entered Alabama and before, the French in early Alabama, gambling, geology, happiness, hunting, the Klan, luxuries, matrimony, Mr. Goode's goats, parents, politicians, the railroad, Reconconstruction, roads, scalawags, slavery, snakes, spelling, surveying, taxes, early French in Alabama, weddings, yellow fever, and typhoid. Click here to read one of Papa Joe's accounts of the nineteenth-century Alabama school system as compared to the 1940s. Click here to read a 1932 article about General Andrew Jackson’s passage through Alabama on the way to defeating the British in 1812 at New Orleans. If it happened in Alabama, Papa Joe had some good insights to share about it. Pictured below is Papa Joe at his other job, Marengo County engineer.

Joel and “Moma Lue” Sarah Jones are buried at Old Shiloh Cemetery in Marengo County, Alabama. (mccr/mccr2.jpg). Joel and Sarah Jones had six children, all of whom were born at Dixon Mills in Marengo County, Alabama. These were:

1)Winnie Jones (1893-1972). She married Lee Stanford Peppenherst.
2) Francis Virginia Jones (1895-1970). She married a relative, Thomas Gracie Norris, Sr.. They had several children, including Joel Buchannon. Joel married Ora Jewel Jones. One of the children of Joel and Ora was Joel Jones Norris (d. 2003), who married Cindy Denise Walker.
3) Price Desaker Jones, born. 1899.
4) John King Jones (1901-2006). He married Perdie Gran Phillips. He was a Baptist preacher at Coats, Alabama. He had a daughter, Betty Jones in Linden, Alabama who never married.

5) Samuel Jones (1905-1993). He was a civil engineer for the state of Alabama. Samuel’s daughter is family historian, Shirley Jones McCreedy. Pictured to the left in the 1970s is an example of Shirley’s historical work. She helped the Marengo County Historical Society establish a marker by the side of the engineering officer at Dixon Mills, Alabama where her journalist-historian-civil engineer grandfather, Joel D. Jones used to work. Standing near the marker at its dedication, with the building in the background, were Erskine Braswell and Mrs. Larry Walters, both of the County Historical Society, Shirley McCreedy and Charles Summersell, professor of history at the University of Alabama. Joel’s son, Rev. John K. Jones of Linden, gave the invocation at the ceremony.

6) Mary Louvania Jones (1907-1990). She married later in life and had no children. Her husband was Bill Reed, a relative.