About the Author
The Macon Telegraph and News December 27, 2001, page 6 B
| Mercer bestows honorary degree on Twiggs'
historian Mercer President R. Kirby Godsey, left, presents Bess Vaughn Clark, center, with an honorary bachelor of arts degree for her historical and genealogical research and writings in reconstructing the lost records of Twiggs County. Clark's son, Francis, right, of Atlanta, attended the ceremony, along with approximately 50 family members and friends at the Lee Alumni House on the Mercer Campus. Born near the university, Clark has literally been close to Mercer her entire life, with four generations of her family having attended the university. When fire destroyed the Twiggs County Courthouse and nearly all of the county's records in 1901, a century's worth of material was lost. In the 1970's, Clark, whose connections to Twiggs go back five generations, committed herself to re-creating those records. She dedicated time to piecing together the history of Twiggs County from such sources as newspaper legal notices, deeds and wills in private families, family Bibles, tax and land lottery lists, Indian depredations, Georgia legal information and private journals and memoirs. Clark realized her dream of telling these all-but-forgotten stories in 1987, when she published "Twiggs County Georgia Abstracts: Records of a Burned County." Just last year, she updated the volume with new information and published "Twiggs County Georgia Records: A Reconstructed heritage." Clark is also well known in the Macon community for her leadership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of American Colonists, the Georgia Division of the Magna Charta Dames, the Daughters of Colonial Wars, and the Federated Garden Clubs of Macon Inc. A member of Vineville Baptist Church for more than 50 years, Clark has supported Baptist causes, libraries across Georgia and educational initiatives including Mercer University. |
Kirby Godsey, Bess Clark, Francis Clark |
TWIGGS TIMES January 2, 2002, Jeffersonville, GA
'Twiggs County lady' given honorary degree
Love's labors can linger longer than that which is done for pay, but the rewards of labor like that last a lifetime.
Bess Vaughn Clark, known commonly as "the Twiggs County lady," knows her labors aren't unnoticed. Her books, Twiggs County Georgia Abstracts: Records of a Burned County and Twiggs County Georgia Records: A Reconstructed Heritage, are in demand across the country, and her work has landed her another laurel lately: an honorary bachelor of arts degree from Mercer University.
From her home in Macon, Clark, a self-described "wild-eyed fanatic" about Twiggs County, said she is working on a third book and has even more to give the county, state, and generations to come than the already weighty contribution she's made to history and genealogy.
"People have been so generous to share with me," she said, "I'm so excited about this, to know that it's hitherto unpublished material. I thought, why just do the same old families? There are other people I wanted to put something in print about, other people that live there."
Though Clark was born in Macon and has never lived in Twiggs, hers were some of the first to settle the area.
"The first one to come to Twiggs was Daniel Vaughn, and he'd drawn land early in the lottery of 1807," she said. "They died before the War Between the States, in about '50 or '52, and their son was my great-grandfather, William Thomas Vaughn."
"William Thomas, an officer in the War of 1812, left the family a legacy that Clark would pick up years later. "He was a meticulous record keeper," she said. It was the loss of courthouse records in a fire in 1901 that motivated Clark to replace those records in the '70's and '80's.
"My father was fortunate enough to live close by, and he remembered things his Grandfather had told him like about the way they came . . . in a wagon drawn by oxen," she said.
For information about getting your own copy of Clark's books, check online at www.twiggscounty.com .
(Errata: In this article, it is reported that William Thomas Vaughn was an officer in the War of 1812, when it was his father, Daniel Vaughn, who served.)
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