From DOC

 

    My father’s family, the Hollidays, on the other hand, were more of the hard scrabble sort living in a cabin in the mountains. Daddy was a soldier and fought in The Creek Indian Wars under Andrew Jackson against The Red Sticks who lost twenty million acres in the struggles. Then he was off to Mexico in The Mexican War. He found my older adopted brother, Francisco Hidalgo, an orphan, living in the streets, and brought him back to Georgia. He moved from Fayetteville twenty miles away to Griffin where he worked for a druggist in town, Mr. Monk, at Monk’s Drugs on Tinsley Street, which was just a dirt road. Francisco, later called Cisco, was just a boy but helped stock the shelves. That’s where he met Mama who had come in with her sisters looking for laudanum. 

  “My, Alice Jane, that dashing gallant looks as if he’d eat you up,” Aunt Wanetta whispered, squeezed my mother’s arm, and laughed. 

  Daddy was shy, but said that Mama looked like a satin doll and that he was smitten at first sight. He knew she was out of reach, but he was ambitious. He built a fine two storey stucco covered brick house and courted Mama for a year. Grandpap Bill was impressed, and they were married in Griffin's First Presbyterian Church in June of 1848. Aunt Fawnie said that she had never seen so many flowers, all white: roses, lilies, and baby’s breath. 

  Mama settled into married life. It was not what she was used to. She could not even bring Mammy along and mourned her loss. My sister, their first born, Martha Eleanora, came and left them a year later. Measles took her in the crib. Mama was inconsolable, and Daddy thought the only remedy could be me. I was born August 14th, 1851, under the sign of the lion and christened in March, 1852. Do you suppose that makes a difference? Will it help me to Heaven? 

Two

  Uncle John Stiles Holliday lived in Fayetteville along with the rest of Daddy’s family.