This site presents two family scrapbooks, a loose folder of related keepsakes, and a supplemental file of colonial- and antebellum-era documents — together a cache of correspondence, photographs, newspaper clippings, school reports, obituaries, and ephemera that traces a single extended Southern family across more than two centuries. The first two scrapbooks were compiled over four decades by Amy Ann Perry FitzSimons (1888–1973), Mrs. James Pickens Walker — Charleston-born, raised on the Edisto River, and a lifelong custodian of family memory. The collection runs from a 1760 South-Carolina Gazette Marine Intelligence notice (Book 4, p24) to a 1972 graduation invitation from Corbeil-Essonnes, France (Book 1, p415).
The surnames that recur across the collection trace a kin network anchored in Charleston and radiating outward: FitzSimons, Pritchard, Stoney, Gaillard, Barker, Walker, McEwan, Corbell. The geography moves Charleston → Savannah → Jacksonville → Orlando along one axis as the family followed Atlantic Coast Line Railroad postings through the 1920s and '30s, with a counter-arc to the Western North Carolina summer belt — Brookland, Black Mountain, Hendersonville — recurring across more than a century. Each scan is presented alongside a transcription of its cursive hand and, where useful, editorial annotations that identify the people, places, and historical events behind the everyday references. What follows is a brief tour of the principal threads.
Christopher FitzSimons, the Irish emigrant
Christopher FitzSimons (1762–1825), the family's founding figure in America, was born at Dundalk in County Louth, Ireland, and reached Charleston in 1781–83 to qualify as executor of his bachelor uncle's substantial estate. The uncle's 1782 will (Book 4, pp1–2) — and a separate 1761 newspaper notice locating his Tradd Street chandler's shop (Book 4, p25) — anchor the family in colonial Charleston. The nephew Christopher built on that inheritance to become a leading Charleston merchant and a member of the South Carolina State Legislature; his 1825 Charleston Mercury obituary (Book 4, p10) credits him with advocacy of the 1819 Internal Improvements Act and a War of 1812 donation to the city's fortifications. Read more →
Catherine Pritchard and the Hobcaw inheritance
In 1788 Christopher married Catherine Pritchard (1772–1841), daughter of the Charleston shipwright Paul Pritchard of Hobcaw, and through her the FitzSimons line absorbed the Lowcountry Pritchard estate. Paul Pritchard's 1791 will (Book 4, pp3–6) bequeathed the Hobcaw shipyard on the Wando River along with named enslaved workers; A. S. Salley's 1909 Pritchard genealogy (Book 4, p15) traces the line forward to Wade Hampton III — born in the Pritchard-FitzSimons house on Hasell Street in 1818, grandson of Christopher and Catherine through their daughter Ann (Mrs. Col. Wade Hampton II). Catherine bore sixteen children; only one, Paul of Augusta, outlived her. Her paired 1841 obituaries (Book 4, pp16–17) close out the second generation. Read more →
Lafayette in Charleston, 1825
The opening page of the compiler's memoir (Book 2, p1) recounts the family's beloved nurse Becky, who told the young Amy, "Missy I don't rightly know — but I does know this — I was 3 days old the last time Genl. LaFayette came to Chas'." Lafayette's farewell tour reached Charleston in March 1825, pinning Becky's birth to mid-March of that year — a vivid example of how, throughout the archive, public history serves as the chronological yardstick for private memory.
The 1862 Walhalla refugee letters
In June 1862, Ellen Milliken Barker wrote from the upcountry town of Walhalla to her son William in besieged Charleston (Book 1, pp101–104). The letter — describing a town newly silenced by men sent off to the war, the difficulty of finding furniture in a refugee town, and an upcountry diet her ailing husband cannot tolerate — is among the most intimate Civil War documents in the archive. Walhalla, a German-colonization town in Oconee County, became a common Lowcountry-gentry refuge from the Charleston blockade after 1862.
Mount Hope at Willtown Bluff
In 1893, Samuel Gaillard FitzSimons Sr. — the compiler's father — acquired the Mount Hope tract at Willtown Bluff on the Edisto River, ten miles below Adams Run. Mount Hope had been built by Col. Lewis Morris of Gen. Nathaniel Greene's Revolutionary staff; it passed through the Elliott family, the Harmons, Arthur Whitney, and Harold Stanley of New York after the FitzSimons tenancy. A long Willtown Bluff feature article (Book 2, p21) dates the end of the Lowcountry rice-planting era to the 1911 hurricane; the same rice-economy collapse that destroyed the older planter class made the tract affordable in 1893. Mount Hope was the compiler's childhood headquarters and recurs throughout the album (Book 2, p48, p113; Book 4, p20). Read more →
The 1893 Sea Islands hurricane
The compiler's childhood memoir (Book 2, p6) refers in passing to "the storm of '93" — the August 1893 Sea Islands hurricane, which killed an estimated 2,000 people along the SC and GA coast and ranks among the deadliest in U.S. history. The storm became the chronological anchor by which Lowcountry survivors dated the rest of their lives, and its name appears in the archive without explanation, as if no Lowcountry reader could have needed one.
Hendersonville and the Western North Carolina summer arc
The family's tie to the Western North Carolina mountains is the longest unbroken thread in the archive. Major Theodore Gaillard Barker (1832–1917) — a Confederate adjutant of the Hampton Legion, later chief of staff to Wade Hampton — kept his summer home Brookland near Hendersonville from at least the 1880s, where the compiler visited "Uncle Theodore & Aunt Louisa" as a child (Book 1, pp132–133, p168). Through the 1920s the Walkers boarded the children with Mrs. Broadfoot at Black Mountain each summer (Book 2, pp117–118) while Pickens Jr. attended Camp Carolina at Brevard. Gaillard Stoney FitzSimons composed an unpublished memoir near Hendersonville on 7 June 1949 (Book 1, p219). A 1953 snapshot caught the Main Street fire that destroyed the Monroe Hotel and the "Famous" store (Book 2, p209); through the 1950s and '60s, family correspondence routed regularly through Asheville and Hendersonville addresses. Family members still reside in the area today — a continuous WNC presence of more than 140 years. Read more →
Amy FitzSimons Walker, who built this album
The compiler moves through her own archive as photographer, annotator, and silent editor. Her childhood at Mount Hope (Book 2, p51) gave way to schooling at the Peabody School in Washington, D.C. (Book 2, p37) and St. Mary's in Raleigh (Book 2, p45), her christening at Charleston's St. Philip's (Book 2, p256), a St. Cecilia Society debut, her 20 October 1908 marriage to James Pickens Walker Sr., and four decades raising the three Walker children whose photographs, letters, and clippings fill most of the second volume. Her own 1973 obituary appears at Book 2, p246. Read more →
The Walker branch: Philippi to the Atlantic Coast Line
The compiler's husband, James Pickens Walker Sr. (1883–1960), brought a different inheritance into the family. He came not from Lowcountry stock but from Overfield in Barbour County, West Virginia — Union-side Appalachian country, and his eventual burial at Philippi (a 1960 condolence letter at Book 2, p253) returned him to that seat. He played varsity football at Washington & Lee in 1901–02 (Book 2, pp046, 050) and built his career on the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, whose Savannah and Jacksonville headquarters determined every subsequent family residence (Book 2, pp136–138, p141, p241). Read more →
The twin weddings of June 1941
On 14 May 1941, the Walkers' daughter Mary Ann married Lt. Oswald Beverley McEwan at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Jacksonville (Book 2, pp187–191). Six weeks later, on 26 June 1941, her brother James Pickens Walker Jr. married Ann Seymour Knight in the same church (Book 3, p17). The two ceremonies — separated by forty-three days and a single aisle — bracket the family's last weeks of peacetime before American entry into the Second World War.
The family's WWII service
Three of the Walker children's husbands served in the U.S. armed forces during the war, all documented within the album by photograph rather than service record. Lt. Oswald McEwan appears in a 1941-vintage studio portrait wearing Field Artillery insignia (Book 2, p181); the family records his fuller wartime story orally, beyond the scope of the scrapbook itself. Capt. James Pickens Walker Jr. sat for a Medical Corps captaincy portrait c. 1942–45 (Book 2, p169). Dr. Robert Corbell Jr. joined the 82nd Airborne Division in June 1941 as a battalion surgeon, training at Ft. Belvoir and Ft. Benning (Book 2, p192). A September 1944 letter from a former Walker household servant, "Edna," provides a wartime echo from outside the family proper: her son-in-law is fighting in the Italian Campaign with the 25th Chemical Decontamination Company under Gen. Mark Clark's Fifth Army (Book 2, pp176–178). Read more →
Bishop Juhan's two-day Walker rite, November 1950
On 25 November 1950, Florida's long-serving Episcopal bishop Frank Alexander Juhan baptized James Pickens Walker Sr. as an adult of sixty-seven (Book 3, p23); the next morning, in the same parish, Juhan laid hands on his son James Pickens Walker Jr. to complete his confirmation (Book 3, p20). The compressed two-day rite — father and son receiving the apostolic sacraments back-to-back at Jacksonville's Church of the Good Shepherd — closes a Walker thread that had opened with the 1941 weddings in the same building.
The 1953 Puck Corbell deathbed letters
The most affecting cluster in the archive runs from December 1952 through May 1953: a year of letters surrounding the terminal illness of Robert Lawrence "Puck" Corbell, the eight-year-old son of Emma Dee Walker Corbell, treated for osteosarcoma at Memorial Hospital, New York — in a pre-modern oncology era of pre-amputation X-rays and palliative care. Letters from a Mrs. Baumeister to the family (Book 2, pp219–227; Book 3, pp12–16) report each visit and conversation, and Puck's obituary appears at Book 2, p227. Read more →
Provenance: how the album reached the present
Amy FitzSimons Walker compiled essentially all of what is here, working into the early 1970s. After her death on 1 December 1973, the scrapbooks passed briefly through her only daughter Mary Ann Walker McEwan — who survived her mother by just sixteen months — and from there to Mary Ann's daughter Nancy McEwan, who held the albums for many decades. Very little appears to have been added to the bound volumes after Amy's death, beyond her own obituary and Mary Ann's. The two scrapbooks, the loose folder, and the supplemental colonial- and antebellum-era documents are presented here together for the first time. Read more →
Continue with the volumes below, or use the People and Places indexes to trace individuals and locations across the four books.