Children of John Hosea McNeill Kerr and Eliza Catherine Yancey Kerr

 John Hosea McNeill Kerr (1844-1924) and Eliza Catherine Yancey Kerr (1844-1927) had several interesting children. She is a grandniece of Bartlett Yancey (1785-1828).

Born in Yanceyville, NC. John Hosea Kerr (1873-1958): Graduated from Wake Forest (N.C.) College in 1895; studied law; was admitted to the bar in 1895 and commenced practice in Warrenton, N.C.; mayor of Warrenton, N.C., in 1897 and 1898; solicitor for the third district of North Carolina 1906-1916; judge of the superior court 1916-1923; trustee of the University of North Carolina; delegate to the Democratic National Conventions in 1932 and 1940; chairman, United States delegation to the Inter-American Travel Congress in Mexico City in 1941; elected as a Democrat to the Sixty-eighth Congress to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Claude Kitchin; reelected to the Sixty-ninth and to the thirteen succeeding Congresses and served from November 6, 1923, to January 3, 1953; chairman, Committee on Elections No. 3 (Seventy-second through Seventy-fifth Congresses).

Mary Graves Miles Kerr (1875-1965): Married Yanceyville Dr. William Oliver Spencer, M.D. (1863-1938). She graduated from Oxford Seminary as valedictorian and taught school in a private school in Yanceyville. In 1921 she was Regent of the Society of the DAR in the State of North Carolina; as vice-president of the NC Society of UDC she was in charge of their scholarship program; in 1921 she was guest speaker for the dedication of the Confederate Monument in Yanceyville. For some years she was society editor of the Winston-Salem Journal. After her husband's death in 1938 she was assistant collector of Internal Revenue for the Winston office. A Democrat, she had been chairman of the Forsyth Party. An ardent Baptist, Mrs. Spencer taught the young adult Sunday School class at the First Baptist Church, Winston-Salem. She was Mother of the Year for North Carolina. Her initials "MKS" are found on the World War I monument on the Square in Yanceyville. She wrote the "Lest We Forget" inscription.

Albert Yancey Kerr (1878-1942) served as Yanceyville postmaster and owner/editor of "The Caswell News" newspaper that he published in the Azariah Graves storehouse building that still stands in Yanceyville and has been used as a restaurant. See photograph. He is the father of Eliza Katharine Kerr Kendall (1921-1997), Mary Frances Kerr Donaldson (1923-2016), and George Yancey Kerr (1925-1986). The two sisters collaborated on several books documenting Caswell County records. They are must haves for any serious Caswell County researcher.

Martha Frances Kerr (1883-1965) married Milton and Yanceyville merchant Alexander Hampton (AH) Motz (1885-1973). The A. H. Motz building still stands today on the Square in Yanceyville. See 1935 photograph. Their only child, Mary Kerr Motz (1917-2005) was a Yanceyville fixture for many years, and her house still stands.

Nannie Emma Kerr (1885-1978) married much beloved Yanceyville physician Dr. Stephen Arnold Malloy, M.D. (1972-1944). See photoraph. Many children delivered by Dr. Malloy carry his surname as their middle name. After the arrival of Dr. Malloy in Yanceyville in 1897, the town had the benefit of two doctors for only a few years. Around 1906, Dr. William O. Spencer, M.D., moved his practice (and surgery) to Winston-Salem, NC. As Dr. Spencer departed Yanceyville around 1906 and Dr. Houston L. Gwynn did not begin his practice until after graduating from medical school in 1923, Dr. Malloy practiced alone for some 17 years. He undoubtedly was one busy physician!

The Missing Chapter in the Life of Thomas Day by Patricia Dane Rogers and Laurel Crone Sneed (2013)

The Missing Chapter in the Life of Thomas Day

By Patricia Dane Rogers and Laurel Crone Sneed (2013)

Late in the spring of 1835, a rising young African American furniture maker from Milton, North Carolina, named Thomas Day (1801–ca. 1861) traveled to Philadelphia (fig. 1). Under normal circumstances, it would have been logical for a professional artisan to visit this bustling commercial hub in search of new business contacts and the latest fashions in furniture making, but circumstances were not normal. After Nat Turner’s bloody insurrection in August 1831, white-on-black violence targeting free blacks and antislavery activity had increased and spread. It was dangerous for any free person of color, let alone a southerner, to be in the so-called City of Brotherly Love, where white mobs had attacked and demolished African American businesses and gathering places in that very year as well as in 1832 and 1834.

Day was in Philadelphia for a different purpose: to attend the Fifth Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in the United States. This event attracted the nation’s most prominent free African American antislavery leaders, a group described as “men of enterprise and influence” who were on hand to forward an ambitious and wide-ranging platform. In the course of five days, the attendees formally called for improved African American access to schools and jobs and a boycott of sugar produced by slave labor. They railed against the growing number of proposed plans for African colonization by former slaves and free blacks and pledged temperance, thrift, and moral reform. The delegates also vowed to blanket Congress with a pamphlet campaign to outlaw slavery in the District of Columbia “and its territories.” Most emphatically, the group proclaimed its belief in universal liberty and racial equality: “We claim to be American citizens and we will not waste our time by holding converse with those who deny us this privilege unless they first prove that a man is not a citizen of that country in which he was born and reared.”[1]