New association; new cousin

This year I decided I would expand my horizons and join a new club -- The Middle Tennessee Genealogical Society.  The January meeting was show and tell.  People showed items that had belonged to their ancestors and told the story of the item and its original owner.  I was new to the group and really didn't have any items from anyone beyond my parents to share so I waited until everyone had shared first.  One lady showed a very lovely, old teapot and a photography of her three times great grandmother who had owned it.  I was stunned when she said her great-grandmother's father was Sugars Turner from Madison County, Alabama.

Sugars Turner (1770-1836) is my four times great grandfather on my mother's side.  Sugars was a wealthy landowner in Alabama.  His son, William Henry Turner (1810-1867), was the much older brother to Harriett Turner who is my new cousin's relative.  William Henry Turner married into the well-to-do Webster family of Columbia, Tennessee.  His wife, Caroline (1813-1852), was the daughter of Jonathan Webster (1767-1845), a Revolutionary War veteran, who brought mules to Maury County.

My two times great-grandfather, William "Bill" Melton Turner (1844-1905), was William and Sarah's fifth child and his father's namesake.  His two older brothers had been named after their grandfathers.  Bill, who from his photograph appears to have a physical handicap, married Clarisa Campbell (1848-1927) and had my great-grandfather, Alexander Turner (1868-1935).

Bill Turner had moved the family from Madison County, Alabama to Warren County, Tennessee, where Alexander Turner married Tabitha Hennessee (1873-1899).  Tabitha makes me sad because she died when my grandmother, Lillie Turner (1894-1981), was only five and I can't find where she was buried.  The story goes that Alexander left Warren County after Tabitha's death leaving his three young children in the care of his father, Bill, while he sets out to find a new wife and mother for his children.  He marries Martha Hobbs in Giles County and brings her back to Warren County to reunites the family.  Their first child, a daughter, is named Tabitha.

By 1905, the family is living back in Madison County, Alabama.  At the age of 15, Lillie is living with her father, step-mother and siblings and is listed as a farm worker.  It seems like hard work for a young girl but there was only her father and older brother, Arsey, to help feed a large young family of mostly girls.  In 1914, at the age of 20, she marries the handsome Lummie Edwards (1891-1928).

Lillie and Lummie had five children to survive and one that only lived a year.  Their youngest, my mom, Gladys Edwards (1927-2012), was only 14 months old when Lummie died of pneumonia.  Lillie was no stranger to death and hard work.  She never got to live in a home she owned.  She never got to enjoy a life of luxury that her great-grandparents had known.