I-Pariss Sims, 1750-1833.

II-1. Robert Sims, the oldest child of Pariss and Keziah Royster Sims, was born in Salisbury District, near Salem (WinstonSalem) N. C., May 14, 1783. He married Frances Howard Merritt, an orphan of English ancestry, Feb. 14, 1813, in North Carolina. She was born March 7, 1797; died in Tennessee Nov. 28, 1871.

On November 1, 1819, when their third child, Robert William Sims, was four months old, the family left North Carolina for Tennessee where they settled on Lynn Creek in Giles County, near where his father had settled in 1807. In 1833, after the death of his parents, Robert moved, with all of his family, to Wayne County and settled on Bear Creek in what today is known as Lutts Community. He purchased the farm of John Lawson, a pioneer settler in the area.

Bear Creek, a prong of Indian Creek, is South-west, some eight or ten miles, from the old Sims Post Office Community in the upper Indian Creek Valley, where the family finally settled, and where the writer was born in 1892. Florence, Alabama, and the Tombigbee River area in Mississippi, where three of Robert's younger brothers, Matthew, John and William, settled, are some 30 miles to the South from the Indian and Bear Creek sections, Wayne being a border county to both Alabama and Mississippi.

Wayne County had been Creek Indian territory until the first white settlers came in 1815. Zachariah Thompson, Jesse and Baker Cypert, ancestors on my mother's side, settled on Indian Creek in 1818. Thompson built a two story log house on what was later known as the Copeland farm owned by my father from 1900 to 1909. The county was organized in 1819 and Jesse Cypert was a member of the first county court.

The Natchez Trace, followed by Andrew Jackson and his men to the Battle of New Orleans in the war of 1812, now being developed into a National Parkway between Nashville, Tenn., and Natchez, Miss., passes through Wayne county, near the headwaters of both Indian and Bear Creeks. The Trace, with its Trading Posts and Inns, was an early venture in Inter-State road building and was of considerable economic benefit to new territory. After the U. S. Government acquired Natchez from the Spanish in 1798, the Trace was cleared as a communications line between frontier settlements in Mississippi and Tennessee. It was traveled by early settlers, circuit-riding preachers, teachers, soldiers, Post riders and robbers.

In 1800, the U. S. Government inaugurated mail service on the Trace between Nashville and Natchez, once a month each way. By 1816 the mail service had increased to three trips per month. A marker on the Trace, now a completed National Parkway, through Wayne and Lawrence counties, reads:

"This early venture in Inter-State road building produced little more than a snake infested, mosquito beset, robber haunted, Indian pestered passage through the forest. The pious lamented it. The impious cussed it; all found it a trial of strength and patience. When the trail became so waterlogged that an ox-cart could not be pulled through, travelers cut new paths through the adjoining woods."

The above serves as a good description of the early trails that our ancestors followed into the frontier country. The Bear Creek valley in which Robert Sims settled with his family in 1833 heads at the Trace, a few miles west of the McGlamery Stand (an early Trading Post and Inn on the Trace), near the present town of Collinwood. Indian and Dry Creeks and Waterfall Branch, Sims country for more than a hundred years, head at the Trace which follows a water-shed ridge. Cypress Inn, another noted Trading Post on the Trace, now a village with a Post Office near the Alabama line, is some eight miles South-west of the old McGlamery Stand. From there the Trace stretches into Alabama and Mississippi, where the younger brothers of Robert Sims settled.

In 1964 I had the pleasure of driving the Trace, now a beautiful Parkway, from the Meriwether Lewis (of the Lewis and Clark expedition to the far West) National Monument in Lawrence County to the Alabama line, musing, as I traveled, as to what the area was like when our ancestors traveled that way 132 years ago.

Soon after Robert Sims settled on Bear Creek, trouble developed--one of his boys shot a neighbor's dog that had gotten into the family milk supply in. the springhouse. After a lawsuit over the incident he sold his farm and moved to Hardin's Creek where he bought a small farm in what has long been known as the Hutton Hollow. There he died, March 21, 1842. He is buried in the Brown graveyard, on a knoll on the east side of the Hollow, about a mile from Hardin's Creek and two miles South-west of the Philadelphia Baptist Church of today.

Soon after his death, his widow and younger children moved to Indian Creek, near her oldest son, Matthew J. Sims, who had married and settled there. There she died at the home of her youngest son, Abraham Martin Sims, November 28, 1871. She is buried in the Sims burying ground on top of a high hill on the old home place of Shields Sims, my grandfather.

In 1912, a year before his death, Abraham Martin Sims gave me the following statement in regard to his father's family:

"Father and mother were poor. Their wealth was their children. Mother lived to see all of her children grown and what was wealth to her, all had a clean record. Father had a fair common school education but mother had no school advantages.

"We were raised in the country, had the benefit of a log house school about three months of the year. We grew what we ate and wore clothes made at home. Generally, our shoes were made at home, from cow hides, tanned in a trough.

"My grandfather and grandmother (Pariss and Keziah Royster Sims) are buried in Giles County. I never saw but one uncle of my grandfather's family (Martin Sims of Bedford County, Chapter Fourteen)".

 

III-10. Sallye Merritt Sims, born in North Carolina, Jan. 9, 1814; died in Oklahoma, April 27, 1885. She married C. M. Lawson of Wayne County, March 21, 1839. They moved to Muskogee, Okla., in the Indian Territory, where they had two sons, Mordicai and Amos, and a daughter, Jane.
III-11. Matthew Joseph Sims, born in North Carolina, June 9, 1816; died in Wayne County, Tenn., Jan. 16, 1890. See Chapter Five for family record.
III-12. Robert William Sims, born in North Carolina, July 8, 1819; died in Crockett County, Tenn., Dec. 10, 1905. See Chapter Ten.
III-13. Abby Caroline Sims, born in Giles County, Tenn., July 3, 1822; died in 1886. She married Joseph Sutherland and moved to Warsaw, Mo. See Sims-Sutherland Family, later in this chapter.
III-14. Frances Jane Sims, born in Giles County, March 2, 1825; died March 28, 1851, unmarried. She is buried in the King graveyard, Waterfall Branch.
III-15. Margaret (Peggy) Ann Sims, born in Giles County, Oct. 19, 1827; died in Wayne County, Jan. 29, 1901; married John William Youngblood-see Sims-Youngblood Family, later in this chapter.
III-16. George Washington Sims, born in Giles County, Feb. 22, 1831. See Chapter Eleven.
III-17. Abraham Martin Sims, born in Wayne County, June 13, 1834. See Chapter Twelve.
III-18. Martha Sims, born March 11, 1839; died Aug 11, 1914. She never married-lived with her brother, Abraham M. Sims.

Abby Carolyn Sims, (13) above, married Joseph Sutherland, Nov. 6, 1842. They moved to Warsaw, Mo., in 1851 and had a family of six children:

IV- Dr. William Walter, Martha Ann (Matt), Irene, Margaret, James Franklin, and Marcus (Mark) Sutherland. Dr. Sutherland settled near Booneville, Miss., where he died in 1909. He married Annie Naomi Nelson and they had eight children:

V- Albert, Jessie, Willie May, Dr. Wade Hampton, Robert Lee, Arthur, Tennie and Don Carlos Sutherland.

Dr. Wade Hampton Sutherland founded the Sutherland Clinic, now the Northeast Mississippi Hospital at Booneville. He married Daisy Dickerson and they had seven children:

VI- Helen, Sybil, L'Orent, Haden, Jeffery Elinor, Maxine, and Mayford. Sybil is the mother of Annie Patrick, wife of Dr. Robert Lee Lambright, Baptist missionaries in Indonesia. Jeffery Elinor married John 0. Bronson and is the mother of:

VII-John 0. Bronson, Jr., who has been of great assistance in compiling the data of the Sutherland family, and, in securing DAR membership for his mother, as mentioned in Chapter Three. He is librarian at the Alabama Junior College, Decatur.

IV- James Franklin, second son of Joseph and Abby Sims Sutherland, had a son George, father of Eddie Sutherland of Louisiana, Mo. Eddie has a brother, George, Yarnell, Ariz., a sister, Mrs. Mildred Stephens, Pekin, Ill., and a daughter, Mrs. Virginia Sweeney, Hixon, Tenn., who was granted BAR membership in 1964, on the Revolutionary War record of Pariss Sims.
IV- Marcus (Mark) Sutherland (IV), youngest child of Abby C. and Joseph Sutherland, attended the Sims reunion in Wayne County in 1948. He was in his 89th year at the time and was one of three great, great grandsons of Pariss Sims, who were in attendance. He has a son, Clyde Sutherland, who is Administrator of the Veteran's Hospital at Iowa City, Iowa.
IV- Albert Sutherland (V) was a teacher and lawyer in Mississippi. Robert Lee was a teacher and Superintendent of Education in Prentiss County, Miss. Arthur died unmarried. Don Carlos was with the railway mail service, now retired; lives in Jackson, Tenn.

Margaret (Peggy) Ann Sims (15) above, married John William Youngblood of Wayne County, Aug. 22, 1846. He was born March 7, 1819. They moved to Arkansas where he died Oct. 6, 1874, and the family returned to Wayne County.

The Youngblood family, originally of North Carolina, came to Wayne County from Rutherford County, Tenn. John and a brother, Josiah, the father of my grandmother, Melinda Youngblood Sims, were sons of William Youngblood and Edith Reed Youngblood. William was an early settler in Rutherford County; died in 1844. His wife died in 1875. A brother, John F. Youngblood, born in Rutherford County in 1804, is said to have died in Texas in 1910 at the age of 106. William, the grandfather of my grandmother, was a soldier with Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans in the war of 1812.

John William and Peggy Ann Sims Youngblood were the parents of Jim, Joe and Matt (twins) Youngblood, who operated one of the largest drygoods stores in Clifton, Tenn., for many years.

IV-Joe Youngblood, born May 6, 1856; died June 1, 1924; married Mahulda Sims, a sister of my grandfather, Shields Sims (19). See (26) Chapter Five. Children:

V- Roscoe Youngblood, born June 28, 1892. He married Josephine Michie, Nov. 15, 1919. She died of a heart attack, Dec. 7, 1962-no children. Roscoe has operated a store in Clifton for many years; also has two farms, and, for 18 years was City Judge of Clifton, resigning in 1962. He worked for the U.S. Government as an auditor for six years, including the World War One period, and was manager of Food Rationing in Wayne and two other counties during World War Two.
V- Elsie Youngblood, born May 6, 1896, married Byron Claude Lynch, a school teacher of Hohenwald, Lewis County, Aug. 25, 1929. They have one son:

VI- Byron Claude Lynch, 2nd, born Aug. 29, 1934; graduate of Vanderbilt University in mechanical engineering and has four years service in the Navy as a first lieutenant; married Marjory Founier Linfield of Lousiana, June 7, 1958. They live in Baton Rouge, La., and have three children:

VII-Byron C. Lynch, 3rd, born Feb. 8, 1960.
VII-Elizabeth Linfield Lynch, born Nov. 10, 1961.
VII-Marjory Robin Lynch, born March 1, 1965.

V- Joe Youngblood, Jr., born Feb. 14, 1900. He has been a salesman for a large wholesale drygoods firm for many years; married Lena Cole of Wayne County. They live in Waynesboro and have one daughter:

VI- Joe Ann Youngblood, a graduate of Peabody College, Nashville, and an employee of the U.S. Senate, Washington, D. C.

Three children of Joe and Mahulda Sims Youngblood died early in life.

Footnote: Roman Numerals indicate generations; Figures are Sims identification numbers.

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