Descendants of Everett Pittman, many meeting for the first time, gathered April 15 just north of Jackson.
The extended family enjoyed food and fellowship while mingling on the porch, inside and outside the house and spreading across the green, grassy front lawn of the home of Kathey and Joe Griffin.
After arriving, cousins gathered around back, sitting under a sprawling oak tree, and shared research data, more memories and stories. This exchange was led by the family historian, Willie B. Pittman Wooley, “Cousin Willie,” of Laveen, Arizona.
At 80, and just one of the senior cousins, Wooley handed out a page of family genealogical information accumulated over approximately 40 years. In recent years, she has added data from family DNA test results, used Ancestry.com’s resources and also a Pittman family Facebook page to widen family communications, she said.
According to her research and documentation, Pittman was born in 1807 in Robeson County, North Carolina. He married his first wife of three (who is believed to have been named Molsey) in 1832 and they moved to Mississippi. He later moved to Catahoula Parish.
Next in their common line was one of his 11 children with his first wife, she said, and he was Henry Harrison Pittman, born in Pike County, Mississippi in 1850. In 1872, that son went to Louisiana and married his first wife, Sarah Francis Volentine, (whose sister, Sussanah Volentine, had become his father’s third wife the same day). One of Henry Pittman’s eight children, William “Willie” Pittman was born in 1873 in Holum, Caldwell Parish.
“Grandpa Willie” had gone to work in Prescott, Arkansas, where he met and in 1898 married Tamer Gatsie Ann Elizabeth Franklin, Wooley said. They had two sons born in Arkansas and five more after moving down to Enterprise. The second youngest son was Rufus L. “Pig” Pittman who was born in 1913 — Wooley’s father.
“Grandma Gatsie moved out to Buckeye, Arizona, with my dad and our family” after “Grandpa Willie” died in 1948,” she said. Her other living sons, except one, eventually moved to Texas and Arizona, she said. One of the seven sons died at age 2, she said. “Grandma Gatsie” lived to be 97 and was buried in Buckeye. Several cousins shared memories and stories, especially of “Grandma Gatsie,” and asked questions of the family historian and each other.
The family reunion in the Felicianas was originally the idea of a great-granddaughter of “Grandpa Willie,” Kathey Pittman Griffin. She is the granddaughter of the second oldest son of “Grandpa Willie” and “Grandma Gatsie” — Olie Ray, born in 1901. He was the only son to stay in Louisiana, moving from Enterprise to the Tunica area in West Feliciana Parish.
Olie Pittman and his wife, Susie Smith, had a son born in 1934 who was the late Joe Pittman, of West Feliciana Parish. He married the late Gloria McNeal and they reared three girls. Joe Pittman worked at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, for the West Feliciana Parish Sheriff’s Office and at Dixon Correctional Institute in Jackson during his long career in corrections.
The eldest sister, Leisha Pittman Carruth, said she was so happy about the idea of “a reunion where I would get to visit with relatives instead of at a funeral.” She and her husband, David, formerly of Jackson, drove from their home in Marble Falls, Arkansas, where two more generations of Pittmans now live. Both of these sisters also have children and grandchildren living in nearby Mississippi and in the Felicianas along with cousins in East Baton Rouge Parish.
After a series of storms the day before, the “weather could not have been more beautiful,” she continued. Approximately 60 descendants attended the reunion.
A smaller group, a little more than a dozen of the cousins, including of course, the family historian and the previously mentioned Pittman sisters, went to the Enterprise area the following day, April 17. There they visited the graves of Everett Pittman, Henry Harrison Pittman, William Henry “Grandpa Willie” Pittman and the young son, Earvin H. Pittman who drowned at the age of two there in the Ouachita River.
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