Family Memories from John Fox Jr.

Begin forwarded message:
Date: February 5, 2010

To All:

This all started when David and Debbie requested information on our Wheatley ancestors to help Shannon and Mary to pursue their interest in family history. I found a wealth of information on the subject today and I'm wanting to share it with all of you and all of them right now tonight. I hope you find it interesting and informative. We have a great family history and it needs to be shared among the family. I hope to have more to share about the Overall side of the Wheatley family at a later date, but this writing is about the Wheatley family history that's depicted in the family history book that I found earlier today mixed in with a lot of other old documents. If I've already shown it to you or copied you on it before, that's great, but I don't think that I have.

Love,

John Wheatley in Montgomery


----- Original Message -----
Sent: Fri 02/5/10 9:49 PM

Dear David and Debbie....

While moving around and re-arranging some things in my garage today, I ran across a box of keepsakes from a Shapard reunion that I attended in Tennessee many years ago. Included in the box was a Wheatley family history that was put together years ago by Bertha Wheatley Porter with the assistance of my great aunt, Volenia Wheatley Hays, who was one of two sisters of my grandfather, John Fox Wheatley, Sr. I may have received this "Wheatley book" from Allen Brinkley, instead of at the reunion, for he has been extremely generous in sharing documents and pictures with our family on many occasions. Your inquiry and my own interest led me to look through this wonderful book pretty closely tonight, and I would like to share with you some of the highlights of the book as they relate to those people that we are the direct descendants of dating back to the Revolutionary War and beyond. I think you'll find this very interesting and I would encourage you to promptly forward this information to all of your children and to all other family members who might have interest in this information. We can get together later and work out a plan to make copies of this book for all interested parties, but I want to share these amazing details with you right now by e-mail. I will add in my own comments to hopefully make all of this easier to understand for those who might not be as familiar with "the old days" as I am at the ripe old age of 62.

First let me resolve any questions about the "Shapard reunion" mentioned above. PyPy's father, John Fox Wheatley, Sr. (we called him Dandy), was married to Jane Shapard Marks (we called her Mimi) and the maiden name of her mother was Shapard (Mimi told me that her mother was fondly called "Ladybird"). Mimi told me as a child that she had become the acting mother of her two brothers, David and Tom Marks, as a young girl due to the early death of her own mother, and that she and her two brothers were very close. David and Tom Marks later moved from the Shelbyville, TN area to Birmingham, AL, where they were partners in the furniture business for a while and later operated their own separate businesses. David Marks bought out Fitzgerald Furniture Company and called it Marks-Fitzgerald Furniture Company to hopefully retain the existing customers of Fitzgerald, and his business grew to become a highly successful chain of top-notch furniture stores in Birmingham and Huntsville. Tom Marks owned a successful furniture store in Bessemer operating as Marks Furniture Company, and did very well until he was violently killed during a robbery at his store during his senior years, which would have been around the early 1960's.

When Mimi and Dandy closed their long-time Wheatley Lumber Company in Shelbyville, TN, Uncle David Marks offered PyPy a job, so our family (PyPy, MyMy, Jane Anne, and I) moved to Birmingham in about 1955 and lived there for about a year while PyPy proved himself to be a shining star in the furniture sales role and outsold everyone else that he worked with. A new store was opened in Huntsville, AL in 1956 and PyPy was promoted and transferred to become the Assistand Mgr. of the store, reporting to C.H. Gaines as mgr., who was the brother of David Marks's wife, Louise. In the meantime, PyPy's father, Dandy, had tired of being retired and came to Birmingham, where he also was trained in the furniture business, so he also moved to Huntsville and became a full-time furniture salesman working with PyPy. About the same time, PyPy's beloved sister, Aunt Martha Jane Brinkley, and her family also moved to Huntsville, where her husband, Lewis Brinkley, became the credit manager at the same furniture store (Lewis Brinkley had previously managed the family-owned Brinkley Grocery Store in Murfreesboro, TN, but that store had recently closed and Uncle David offered him a job, too.) So now we had my father, grandfather, and uncle all working at the same store and all three of our families lived as neighbors in the same apartment complex in Huntsville, AL and all of us kids attended the same schools. We all later moved into houses that were in the same neighborhood, so everyday was like a family reunion and it was absolutely wonderful for many years.

In about 1964, Daddy was promoted again to become the store manager of the brand new 5-Points West Marks-Fitzgerald store, so we moved back to Birmingham while the other two families remained in Huntsville. Mimi and Dandy passed away around 1970, but the Brinkley family still lives in Huntsville.