Biographer to speak Dec. 11

Carolyn Newton Curry will speak on Friday December 11, 2015 as part of the Georgia Archives Lunch and Learn series. The talk will begin at noon and attendees are encouraged to bring a lunch.

Dr. Curry’s book, “Suffer and Grow Strong; The Life of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 1834 – 1907,” is the first full-length biography of Georgian Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas. It won a 2014 Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council award for excellence in research using the holdings of an archive.

Dr. Curry has been mesmerized and motivated for almost 30 years by the life of this antebellum child of wealth and privilege, who became an archetypal 19th-Century “Southern Lady,” but who then underwent financial ruin and family disintegration during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the aftermath, to emerge as an early 20th-Century “New Woman of the New South.”

She has used not only many published sources, but also of many archival ones, including historic Georgia newspapers, other contemporaneous journals and newspapers, and numerous public records from Richmond and Columbia Counties, including tax and census records, lawsuits, foreclosures, Superior Court Minutes, trust deeds, wills, and deeds, many held within the Georgia Archives.