Moses Sanders and his brothers, Aaron, Isaac, and Francis left many descendants who, from their original home in the Randolph/Montgomery county area of North Carolina, followed the path of western expansion as American pioneers moved West. They were in the forefront of settlement in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Texas. Some family members moved north to Illinois or Indiana; others moved west to Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and California. Sanders were with the Mormon pioneers as they trekked to Utah, and there were Sanders cowboys who drove cattle on the great trail drives. Most were subsistence farmers, but some became citizens of considerable wealth and influence. There were Sanders who owned slaves and even more who fought and died for the Union; there were Sanders who were Baptists and Methodists and those who were Mormons. They were farmers and doctors and lawyers and teachers and musicians and businessmen, but usually they were what Thomas Bailey Saunders III called "just plain folks." In their diversity, they reflected the American experience, especially that of Scotch-Irish pioneers.
One of these Sanders descendants was Thomas Bailey Saunders (the first of six individuals who would bear that name), who left his home in Montgomery County, North Carolina to become one of the most successful ranchers and cattle drivers in Texas in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890s, he wrote a letter to a nephew who had inquired about their shared Saunders family history:“My grandfather married in Virginia. My grandmother's name was Joan Bailey, of the famous old family of Virginia. My grandfather was killed in a fight with the Tories. His brother, Isaac, which is your great grandfather, was the first man that ever built a house on Cross creek below Fayetteville. And another brother by the name of Moses was a Baptist preacher and they had one sister. I have seen her myself. She married a man by the name of Hamilton. I have seen your great grandfather and his wife, and they were very old then. Your grandfather had two brothers, Ben and Joe, they moved to Alabama and their families are there yet. I saw an old lady in New Orleans a few years ago, she was a Saunders and she told me the same story about the Saunders. I have told you all about the old generation that I know…
Your Uncle, T. B. Saunders”
This letter, incomplete as it is, has been a key document for genealogists studying the descendants of the Reverend Moses Sanders and his brothers. Unfortunately, earlier researchers were not aware that the Moses mentioned in the letter was the same Baptist preacher as the one who died in Georgia. Only in the past ten years and with the emergence of the Internet have researchers pooled their efforts; the result is that we have a much fuller and more reliable documentation of this family. In addition, we now know that many of the previous assumptions about the Reverend Moses Sanders are dubious. For example, we have no proof he was born in England or that he served in the Revolutionary War, as previous researchers had suggested.
Below
are links to several articles that deal
specificially with the life of the Reverend Moses Sanders, but
information about him may also be found in articles that deal with
other topics at the "Sanders of Randolph and Montgomery" and the
"SandersGenealogy" Web sites.
One of the most eminent genealogists who have contributed to the re-assessment of the research on the Moses Sanders was Elden Grant Hurst¹ of Salt Lake City. Mr. Hurst was a descendant of Moses' grandson, Moses Martin Sanders, who became one of the early converts to the Mormon Church and eventually moved to Utah. Because of the Mormon emphasis on genealogy, Moses Martin Sanders left documents in which he recorded his family tradition about his ancestors. Unfortunately, however, he knew almost nothing about his grandfather's brothers or other relatives. Later researchers, such as Elden Hurst, have struggled to fill in the gaps.
Elden Hurst's work on the Reverend
Moses Sanders
was published in October 2000 and was based on a lifetime of research
in original records and documents. The most thorough and accurate
assessment of the immediate family of Moses Sanders, it was
printed
as a spiral bound pamphlet, and copies of this
work have been difficult to obtain for several years. In the
spring of 2008, Mr. Hurst gave permission to copy and distribute
his
work to make it available to a wider group of researchers. Accordingly,
through the assistance of Chuck Sanders, who
initially contacted
Mr. Hurst for
permission, and Jim Sanders, who provided a copy of the manuscript, we
are now making this important work available in PDF format to other
Sanders researchers. Please remember all the material
on
these pages is furnished solely for use of individuals
researching their family history. This work remains the intellectual
property of the Elden Hurst estate and copying and distribution
for
profit or for commercial use, whether in print or through electronic
means, is prohibited by copyright law. In
order to open the chapter files of Elden Hurst's work, you will need
Adobe Reader or a similar PDF program. If the
program is not available on your computer you can
download it by clicking on the icon below. Some of these files are very
large and may take take quite a while to download over a slow
connection. In February 2017 Elden Hurst's
daughter's Jeanette Hurst Drake donated a copy of her father's work on
the Reverend Moses Sanders to FamilySearch.org
and one may now access the complete work at that site also.
---Gary
B.
Sanders, June 2008
(revised May 2016, February 2017)
Who
died
29 March 1817
As recorded in the
Elden G. Hurst
Phone: 801-583-0604
E-Mail: ehurst2@uswest.net
20 Oct 2000
PREFACE
Quoting
from this publication:
“Col. Sanders’ great grandfather, Rev. Moses
Sanders, was a
Baptist preacher.
He emigrated from
“History
of Banks
Co., Georgia 1858-1976” a
book compiled by Jessie Julia Mize
Page 53: Repeats the inscription on tombstones mentioned above. Page
81: “The
“The
“The
memorial tablet of the church
and the silver communion service were given by the late C.C. Sanders,
[Editor’s Note: This reference is
to the grandfather not the great grandfather of C.C. Sanders. This
Moses
Sanders, Jr. moved from
Page 94: “
Endnotes(by Gary Sanders) to Preface:
1. As previously mentioned, Elden Hurst published his work on the Reverend Moses Sanders in the year 2000. At that time genealogy forums were flourishing on the Web and the first generation of Internet family researchers were busy exchanging information. One may wonder why Hurst was unaware of the family tradition in Texas among the descendants of Moses' brother Aaron, a tradition that is documented back over a century, to the 1890s. The solution to this question is somewhat complicated, but I believe part of the answer is that Elden Hurst did most of his work before computers were common household items. His research was in land and legal records and in printed material. He does not seem to have spent much time with Internet research and his research was mainly in the records of North and South Carolina and Georgia. His work was apparently typed on a typewriter, not a word processor. Another reason is that the tradition in Texas did not necessarily associate the Reverend Moses Sanders, Baptist preacher, and brother of Isaac and William Aaron with the Reverend Moses Sanders who was died in Georgia. Sam Sanders, a descendant of William Aaron Sanders, organized a Web site in 1997, the William Aaron Saunders Research Group, devoted to research on the descendants of William Aaron, Isaac, and Moses Sanders and at one time more forty or fifty people were members. Most of them were busy researching their immediate family lines and did not spend much time trying to reconcile or combine the varying family traditions. And most of them were descendants of Aaron or Isaac, not Moses. A few believed that there may have been two Moses Sanders who were Baptist preachers, and the insistence by some of the descendants of Christopher Columbus Sanders and Moses Martin Sanders and that the Reverend Moses Sanders was born in England further hindered efforts. Of course, now, due to the work of Elden Hurst, Jim Sanders, and others, we know that the Moses Sanders who lived in Anson, Montgomery, Rowan, and Iredell in North Carolina was the same person as the Moses Sanders who later moved to South Carolina died in Georgia. There were other individuals named Moses Sanders living at the same time: for example, there was a Moses Sanders in Dobbs County, North Carolina, and there was a Moses Sanders in Darlington County, South Carolina, but neither one was a Baptist preacher.-gbs ↩
2. The graves of Moses Sanders and Mary Hamilton Sanders are located on private property near the Grove Level Church near Maysville in Banks County, Georgia. To visit the site one would need permission from the landowner. Among other family members buried at the site are Moses' grandson Joel Sanders (1795-1856) and his wife Esther Johnston (1795-1866). According to Charles W. (Chuck) Sanders and Tom Sanders, who have visited the cemetery, there are probably 10-20 burial sites, but many of the headstones are broken. The cemetery is not maintained at all and there is heavy brush growth in the area. Mold and lichen covers many of the remaining stones. Charles W. Sanders, who maintains the Find-a-Grave memorial for the Reverend Moses Sanders, is a descendant of Moses' son David who died in 1815 while serving in the War of 1812. Christopher Columbus Sanders appears to have been unaware of the given name of Moses' wife and he was also unaware that she was still alive when Moses died.-gbs↩
3. Elden
Hurst appears correct in his theory that the reference to a David and
John Sanders in the article is actually a reference to Moses' sons, not
his brothers, as the mention of Tennesse and Alabama is an anachronism
in the context of traveling evangelists in the 1760s. The mention of an
English birth for Moses has misled genealogists for generations. Moses
Martin
Sanders, in the ordinances performed for the LDS temple in the 1870s,
mentioned nothing about his grandfather being born in England. Moses
Marion Sanders, another grandson,in a memoir written about 1880 said
only that his
grandfather was born in the early years of the previous century.
The first documented occurrence of the claim that Moses was born in
England is the article in Men of
Mark in Georgia in 1909.
Since this was only a few years after
Christopher Columbus Sanders erected the new grave markers to his great
grandparents in 1902, we can probably assume that Christopher Columbus
Sanders or a close relative popularized this theory. By the
1920s
and
1930, further elaborations were added. Moses was said to have
been
a participant in many Revolutionary War battles and to have born scars
from the conflict for the rest of his life. In those days, the
Daughters of the American Revolution usually accepted undocumented
family traditions and by the 1950s or 1960s, there were several dozen
women who had been admitted to the D.A.R. based on Moses' supposed
patriotic service.Today, the D.A.R requires more substantial
documentation than family tradition. Further, at some
point, family historians made rather feeble attempts to
discover
the parents or geographical location in England from which Moses
supposedly emigrated. One of the the most persistent was the claim that
Moses was from Downton in Wiltshire, England. I have been unable to
determine when this theory began but it was widely accepted by 1977
when Jessie Julia Mize wrote her book on Banks County, Georgia. There
was a Sanders family from Downton in the 1600s and some of them
apparently emigrated to Massachusetts and there are some records that
suggest a Moses Sanders among them, but all of this was 70 to 100 years
before the Reverend Moses Sanders was born and, of course, had nothing
to do with him, but once these theories get started, they are hard to
control. Even today, at Ancestry.com dozens of family trees continue to
claim that Moses was born in Downton. It is, of course, in the
estimation of
many people, more prestigious to be descended from English Puritan
gentry than from Scottish sheep herders or Irish potato farmers, which
may account in some part for the popularity of these theories.-gbs ↩
4. Of course, we now know that Moses had brothers in addition to Francis. William Aaron, Isaac, and Francis are his documented brothers, but there could have been others. There is a tradition in Texas that Tabitha is the name of a sister and that she survived until the 1820s and that she was married to a Hamilton. Based on likely family relations, I believe her husband may have been Samuel Hamilton, the brother of Mary Hamilton, the wife of Moses. Samuel appears on the 1790 census of Randolph County, North Carolina. Elden Hurst also states that John Sanders, the youngest son of Moses, sold his lands in 1818 and moved from Georgia. From the research of Jim Sanders, I believe that John moved first to Franklin County, Tennessee, where he appears on the 1830 census. Perhaps he did later move to McNairy County, Tennessee, and then to Tishomingo County, Mississippi, but John is not the John Sanders who appears on the 1830 census of McNairy. Elden's statement that Moses' having signed his will with an "x" indicates his level of education may or may not be relevant. Many people who could read and write did sign their letters and documents with a mark in those days, and there were also people who could sign their names but not read, so the record here is probably inconclusive about whether he was literate or not.-gbs↩
5. Here again, we have the unsubstantiated claim that Moses was born in Downton, England and that he served in the Revolutionary War. The date of 1784 as Moses' move to Georgia is obviously wrong, as there are documents showing he as still living in North Carolina in the late 1780s. As Elden pointed out, he did not move to Georgia permanently until 1798. The mention of Littleton Meeks(1766-1852) and Dozier Thornton(1755-1843), though, is somewhat helpful in providing a clue to Moses' whereabouts immediately before he moved to Anson County, North Carolina. Meeks was said to have come from Pittsylvania County, Virginia (which was created from Halifax County in 1767) and Thornton was said to have come from Lunenberg County (from which Halifax was created in 1752).The research of Jim Sanders has established that some of our Sanders were in Halifax in the 1750s and 1760s and that Moses was in Brunswick County (which adjoins Lunenberg) at the time of his marriage to Mary Hamilton, whose family lived in Brunswick. Certainly, it appears Meeks and Thornton were associated with Moses after Moses moved to South Carolina in the 1790s, but the claim that the Reverend Moses Sanders baptized Meeks in the Dan River is somewhat harder to accept because Moses left Virginia by 1771 and apparently never lived near the Dan River after that (Meeks was four years old in 1771.-gbs↩
Antique map provided by RootsWeb. Graphic design from freeware collection of Cari Buziak.