Paternal Family History
Joel Ninde’s father, Willis Roberts (b. 1843), was also born into a well-to-do family and grew up quite comfortable in the family home at 910 Government Street. Joel Ninde’s great grandmother Mary Taylor Bolles Roberts was quite a matriarch and held her family together for twenty years from the time her husband died during the Civil War until her own death in 1883. The 20-room home was quite spacious with six bedrooms and seven bathrooms located upstairs. Almost all of the other family members and their spouses lived at the home at 910 Government Street periodically over the years. Laura Roberts was married at the time of Willis’s marriage in 1870 and lived with her husband Joseph T. Hunter and baby in the household. Willis had probably shared a room with his bookkeeper brother Walsingham. Lamar and Alexander appear to have died as infants. Mollie, Jennie, and Bessie probably had one or two bedrooms between them. It is unclear where the live-in Irish nurse slept. There were two rooms for servants over the garage complex and another over the kitchen. In 1860 when Willis was seventeen, his fourteen year-old brother died. In 1863, when Willis was twenty years old, his father Joel Abbott Roberts died of heart spasms and was buried in Augusta, Georgia [i]
[i] Isbell records – Information provided by Taylor Abbott
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