Shelby Hobbs
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Shelby Hobbs (abt. 1813 - bef. 1897)

Shelby Hobbs
Born about in Moccasin Gap, Washington, Virginia, United Statesmap
Ancestors ancestors
Husband of — married 21 Oct 1835 (to about 1838) in Lee, Virginia, United Statesmap
Husband of — married about 1840 in Lee, Virginia, United Statesmap
Husband of — married 2 Jul 1882 (to about 1897) in Lee CO., Virginiamap
Descendants descendants
Died before before about age 84 in Yocum, Lee County, Virginia, United Statesmap
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Profile last modified | Created 6 May 2017
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Biography

The following biography was written by Travis S. Hobbs, 4th great-grandson of Shelby and Lucinda Hobbs. It can be found on Family Search [1]

Shelby Hobbs was born about the year 1813 to Ezekiel Hobbs and the former Elizabeth Lilley on the North Fork of the Holston River in Washington County, Virginia, at a place known today as Hobbs Ford, about a mile east of Mendota. There his grandfather Vincent Hobbs, the original English immigrant, had settled on the wild frontier many years before; and there Vincent's son Ezekiel, the father of Shelby, lived all his life. Shelby was the eighteenth in a great family of at least twenty-three children, having fourteen brothers and eight sisters to survive infancy.

In early manhood, Shelby left his native home and removed forty miles west to Lee County, where he lived most of his life a farmer in the section known as Yokum Station, where Dryden is located today. On October 21, 1835 [2] he married Margaret Blubaugh, a daughter of the eccentric Jacob Blubaugh of German stock. Shortly thereafter Shelby and Margaret sold their inheritance of Ezekiel's land on the Holston River to Shelby's elder brother Washington Hobbs, whose wife was a sister to Margaret. (Washington and Catherine remained on this land until their deaths and raised a large family there.) To the union of Shelby and his first wife were born two children: a daughter Martha, and a son whose name is lost to history. This marriage was cut short by the tragic death of the young wife, who drowned in the Powell River. Shelby's great-grandson Earl Hobbs described the awful scene thus:

"The story is that Margaret was trying to swim a horse across the rain-swollen Powell River with the nine- or ten-month-old baby in her arms. The bridle broke, the horse panicked, and all perished."

It is believed that Margaret was buried with her father in the Blubaugh Cemetery northeast of Dryden, but those who know for certain are all likewise dead and buried.

About three years after Margaret's death, Shelby remarried to Lucinda Zion, who like his first wife was of German descent. She would bear twelve children, and is thus the grandmother of most of Shelby's descendants. The children of Shelby and Lucinda were John, Elizabeth, Nancy, Hamilton, France, Mary, Tyler, Zion, James, Job, and twins Newton and Jasper. Four of these children would not survive to the age of marriage.

At the outbreak of the War Between the States, Shelby—a son and grandson of Revolutionary veterans—was too old for war, but three of his sons took up arms in service of the Confederate State of Virginia. Two of these, John and Hamilton, were captured at the Battle of Cumberland Gap in 1863 and held prisoners at Camp Douglas near Chicago, Illinois. In the foul conditions of the camp, John contracted smallpox and was attended to by his younger brother Hamilton, who stayed by his side until John succumbed in November of 1864 and was interred in a mass grave. Word of John's death reached his mother and father in Virginia but a month after they had buried little Newton, who died at the tender age of three in October of that year. (It is the speculation of this writer that the capture of two sons and death of one during the War turned the hearts of Shelby and Lucinda against the Confederate cause, for their twin sons, born in 1861, were originally named for Confederate president Jefferson Davis and general Gustavus Beauregard, but were both renamed while yet infants.)

Several years after the close of the War, a tragic fate befell another of Shelby and Lucinda's children. Mary, the youngest daughter, conceived out of wedlock at the age of eighteen and died either at or shortly after the birth of her son in 1869. The boy was named Ulysses Grant Hobbs after the sitting president, and was raised by Shelby and Lucinda as one of their own children.

In her last years, Lucinda was afflicted with dropsy and died thereof on October 30, 1880. Most probably she was buried on the farm where she lived most of her life. Shelby was now a widower the second time, and once again he remarried. On July 2, 1882, Shelby married a young woman by the name of Susan Rivers, [3] she being his third wife. Shelby was seventy years old and his bride twenty-five. The following year, Susan raised up to Shelby another child, who was called Alpha Lee. Her father's fifteenth child, Alpha was a half-century younger than her oldest sister, and was younger than several of her father's great-grandchildren. Shelby and his third wife were married nearly fifteen years, and Susan recalled that she was always treated kindly by her step-children, most of whom were her elders. Toward the end of his life, Shelby (who could neither read nor write) impressed upon Susan that he wished after his death that she would take Alpha to Bristol, that she might receive a proper education.

Shelby Hobbs departed this life in the spring of 1897 in his eighty-fourth year or thereabouts. Many years later, an obituary of one of his children would recall that Shelby was a "highly esteemed citizen in the community." (That one of Shelby's neighbors, John Parsons, named a son Shelby Hobbs Parsons is a testament to this fact.) He was one of the wealthiest farmers in Lee County. He is believed to be buried on the Hobbs Farm where he lived, though the location of that land in the present day has not been determined at the time of this writing. Today he leaves thousands of descendants scattered throughout the United States, a great number of which remain within fifty miles of his old homeplace in Lee County.

As for Shelby's widow, after his death she and her young daughter designed to go to Bristol, and in October 1897 they packed their personal effects and walked to the depot. On the walk they met their neighbor, Elkanah Pennington, who bade them "Good morning" and said he was sorry that they were leaving. It was the last farewell from their native home.

Upon arriving in Bristol, Alpha enrolled at the Southwest Virginia Institute in accordance with her late father's intention. There she attended one session and began a second, until her health began to decline and a doctor advised her to stop attending school. Susan and Alpha remained in Bristol after that time. Now Shelby had bequeathed the Hobbs Farm, a sizeable estate of 190 acres, to Alpha in his will, while leaving to several of his older children next to nothing. Whispers circulated among some of Shelby's children and sundry neighbors that Susan had influenced her aged husband to cut out his older children and favor her daughter, and that Susan had in some way brought on his death prematurely and had fled Lee County to escape the suspicions of her neighbors. But Alpha never returned to take possession of the farm; it was leased to S. T. Coldiron for a number of years and finally sold off to Joseph B. Barker in 1901. Susan likewise never returned to Lee County and never remarried, living with Alpha the rest of her life. She died at eighty-four in a Michigan hospital in 1941 and is buried in a nameless grave in a potter's field.

NOTE: About ten years ago, numerous online sources began to give the date of Shelby Hobbs' birth as March 20, 1813; that of his second marriage as June 25, 1841; and that of his death as April 30, 1897; as well as the date of Lucinda's birth as November 6, 1819. All four of these dates are almost certainly fabrications, as no genealogist has ever produced a family Bible or other written record that would reveal the exact dates of these events. Only the date of Lucinda's death is known with precision, as it is recorded in the Lee County death register. All that can be ascertained about Shelby's death is that it occurred shortly before his will was proved on May 17, 1897. Moreover, no records survive for Lee County marriages between 1836 and 1849. I encourage serious genealogists to strike these dates from their notes and family trees.

This profile is a collaborative work in progress. If you have information, and citations, you would like to add, please do! Or leave the information in a comment.

Sources

  1. https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/9WPC-NZM
  2. "Virginia Marriages, 1785-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:X5BM-5LW : 29 January 2020), Shelby Hobbs, 1835.
  3. "Virginia Marriages, 1785-1940", database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:X5BS-W3P : 29 January 2020), Shelley Hobbs, 1882.




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DNA Connections
It may be possible to confirm family relationships with Shelby by comparing test results with other carriers of his Y-chromosome or his mother's mitochondrial DNA. Y-chromosome DNA test-takers in his direct paternal line on WikiTree: It is likely that these autosomal DNA test-takers will share some percentage of DNA with Shelby:

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Comments: 2

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Hobbs-3776 and Hobbs-4851 appear to represent the same person because: Same birth date year place, parents, siblings, death year, death county and state.
posted by Eileen Bradley
Hobbs-3776 and Hobbs-4851 may or may not be the same this one has been a hard to do still have to enter all his kids so if anyone can help please do ,because they a lot of begetton back then.

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