According to the reporter, “she was deeply anxious about the faith of her only child,” and had her testimony written down so her son might know her Christian beliefs. Her obituary doesn’t mention the cause but says that she was confined to her bed for a number of years. School may have been his refuge when his mother died of a lingering illness. He must have done well in his studies, because he was admitted to further education at the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery when he was only eighteen years of age. One former student described the curriculum as “the standard one of that time – the classics, mathematics, rhetoric, English composition, and history.” John Henry attended and graduated from the school, his name appearing in class rosters alongside children of some of the other notable families in Valdosta. Varnedoe and his spinster sisters who arrived from Savannah and opened a private school they called the Valdosta Institute. So for one summer at least, John Henry had cousins close again.Īs the War raged on, Valdosta was filled with more refugees – like Professor Samuel M. ![]() It was as far south as one could go and still be in the state of Georgia, and became a temporary home for cousin Mattie’s family as well when they became refugees from the Battle of Jonesboro. In a time when family meant everything, John Henry was surrounded by kin.īut the Civil War scattered the family, as John Henry’s father moved his household to the remote village of Valdosta, close by the Florida border. His Holliday aunts had children as well, as did his McKey relatives. His uncle Robert Kennedy Holliday, who lived twenty miles to the north in the town of Jonesboro, had eight children - with one daughter, Mattie, said to be John Henry’s childhood sweetheart. John Stiles Holliday, who lived thirty miles to the west in the town of Fayetteville, had three boys close to John Henry’s age. While young John Henry had no siblings, he had plenty of cousins, aunts, and uncles. His parents’ only other child, a baby girl they named Martha Eleanora, had died six months after her birth and nearly two years before John Henry was born. But there were no sisters or brothers for John Henry. There was another boy in the Holliday household when John Henry was born - a teenager named Francisco Hidalgo who’d been orphaned during the Mexican War and brought to Georgia by Henry Holliday in his bachelor days.īefore long there were girls coming to join the family: Alice Jane’s younger sisters Eliza and Ella and Margaret, given into Henry Holliday’s guardianship when their father William Land McKey died. His mother, Alice Jane McKey, was the musically talented oldest daughter of a cotton planter, set to inherit some of her family’s fortune. His father, Henry Burroughs Holliday, was a businessman and clerk of the county court. He was born on the 14th of August in 1851 in the little city of Griffin, Georgia. But if you mix together the few recorded facts of his life before he became a legend with details of the lives of his family and set it against the background of the Southern world in which he lived, the history begins to look something like a story… The facts that were noted were nothing more than would appear in any old family Bible. No one knew when John Henry Holliday was born that he would die as a legend called “Doc Holliday.” So no one bothered keeping the kind of records that his future chronicler would need to bring his story back to life. ![]()
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