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A Columbia County Boy's Recollections and Memories of Columbia County Florida (2012) Lenvil H. Dicks

GENERATION SPREAD AND UNUSUAL NAMES

If you were told that you had a friend and relative whose grandfather was born 193 years ago, you might
wonder how this could have happened. Well I’ll tell you and I said grandfather, not great grandfather.
My great grandfather, Joseph Dicks, the same one who stowed away on a ship and came to America in
1833, was born in 1819. After coming to America and working in a rock quarry for a couple of years
and serving several years in the U.S. Army fighting Indians in Florida, he married Sara Taylor and they
started having a large family. In fact, a very large family.

My great uncle Tom Dicks, who is the father of Denver Dicks, out lived his first two wives, after raising
a family with each of them, and he married for a third time and raised another large family, and the last
two children that came along from great aunt Georgia Dicks was Denver and Boston Dicks. Boston was
the youngest of the Tom Dicks family, and Denver was next to it. He is the only one of that generation
still living. He and Boston were bom when great uncle Tom Dicks was beginning to be an old man, and
since great uncle Tom Dicks was the last of the original bunch, and Denver was next to last in the third
family of great uncle Tom, that caused an extremely unusual time spread between the original patriarch,
and the birth ofthe next to last child.

A very interesting aspect of this, to me, is that if Denver lives to the year 2019, that will be the year of
th
his grandfathers (Joseph Dicks) 200 birthday. That ought to be some kind of a record.
Now great uncle Tom and aunt Georgia had a rather unusual way of naming their children. They named
almost all of them after geographical places, with aunt Georgia of course being a geographical place
herself, and then they named their children Maine, (who died at age 12) Spain, Alabama, Cincinnati,
Denver, and Boston. The 2 girls in that bunch were Alabama and Cincinnati, and Maine, Spain, Denver,
and Boston were all boys. I do not know where they got the idea to name all of their children after states
or cities, but no one in the family seemed to question it at all, or to think anything about it.

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