How the Hubbard and Bryant families of Cumberland County, NC are related.

John Edward Hubbard
1867-1926

My branch of the Hubbard family arrived in North Carolina a few years prior to the Civil War.  My grandfather's great-grandfather, John Horace Hubbard, was a Yankee mariner who immigrated to North Carolina from Maine in the early 1850s.  Harry, as he was known, even enlisted and fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.

After the war Harry returned to Cumberland County, married a local girl named Mary Talbot,  and took up farming.  Harry Hubbard fathered nine children before his life ended on July 7, 1900.

Mary Bunce Hubbard
1869-1914

Harry's eldest surviving son, John Edward Hubbard, was born on October 1, 1867, the first of ten siblings born to Harry and Mary Hubbard.  The family lived at Flea Hill, North Carolina during those years.  When John was fifteen years old his mother died.  He likely took up farming with his father full time then, if he had not done so before.

On October 24, 1889, Coonie, as he was called, married Mary Ellen Bunce.  Mary and Coonie's first child, Walter Lee, was born January 1, 1891, and died a few months later on April 17.  The following year, on May 25, 1892, a second son, Willie James Hubbard, was born, the first of ten children who survived to adulthood.  Then, on May 18, 1914, at forty-five years old, her youngest child still in diapers.

Some among the descendants of John Edward and Mary Bunce Hubbard have suggested that Mary may have suffered from some form of depression.  Mary may also have taken her own life.

Mary and Coonie lived near the family of Leonard and Ellen Bryant, near the town of Stedman,

Willie James Hubbard
1892 - 1979

North Carolina.  It has been alleged by some family members, and cannot be proven one way or another at this point, that Coonie may have been having an affair with Len Bryant's eldest, adult daughter, Ardelia.  Some theorize that Mary killed herself upon discovering Coonie's infidelity with a woman ten years her junior.

Soon after Mary's death, John Edward Hubbard married Ardelia Bryant.  The couple had two sons, only one of which survived to adulthood.  He and his mother both eventually relocated to California where they died and were buried.

John Edward 'Coonie' Hubbard died the day after Christmas, 1926, at fifty-six years old.

Thurman & Lillian Hubbard
Feb.16, 1941

Coonie's neighbor, Len Bryant, had another daughter readers of this space have already met, Jennie Bullock Bryant.

When Jennie's sister Delia married Coonie Hubbard in February of 1915, that made Jennie the last of the Bryant daughters remaining single.

By December of the following year, four days before her twenty-seventh birthday, Jennie had run off to California and married a man eleven years her senior, just returned from many years' service in the Philippines.

By 1920, Jenny had returned home to Stedman, with an infant son and a terminally ill husband in tow.  She became a widow just before the end of 1921, months after giving birth to a daughter she named Lillian Maria.

Lillian grew up and married Coonie Hubbard's son Willie's oldest boy, Thurman James Hubbard.  They moved from Fayetteville to Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1950, when my father, Thurman, Jr. was about seven years old.