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HUMPHREY was the white slave owner's last name in Flordia who bought an African slave called Kincey. One of Kincey's sons named Bill and several children were sold to a man named Fain who had a plantation in Bluffton, Georgia. Their last name was changed to Fain. After being freed, most of the other Humphrey siblings returned to Lamont, Florida. Bill decided to stay in Bluffton, and he changed his name back to Humphrey.
When Granddaddy BILL was married to his first wife RENA, Ella (who later became his 2nd wife) was a young girl of 7-9 years old. She slept at the foot of Bill and Rena's bed. No one knows how she came to be sleeping there, but it is thought that because people had so many children and often did not have enough beds for all of them to sleep in, that children slept wherever they could.
Rena turned the ball of cotton in the Fain's cotton gin.
BILL and RENA had five children. They were all born dead. Rena died in childbirth with the fifth child. (Aunt Lonnie said in 1979 that the children were buried somewhere in the woods on the way to the Davis Chapel).
Some time after the death of Rena, Bill married ELLA who had slept at the foot of his bed. Ella was 14 when they got married. Bill was between 39-44 years old.
Ella's mother's name was Matilda. She worked as a cook in the kitchen of the Fain Plantation, Bluffton. Ella's father, a white man named Bill Caruthers, was an overseer on the plantation.
Ella was Matilda's first child. Matilda later married a man by the name of Charles Whitehead, and for all practical purposes, legal and otherwise, this was the only father Ella ever knew.
Ella looked like a white woman. She was about 5 feet tall and had very long hair that she could actually sit on. She had a telescope that stood on a stand. You would put cards in it to see pictures, something like a present day Viewmaster. She smoked a pipe. She wore a size 4 and a half shoe.
In 1887, Friendship Baptist Church in Bluffton was established. Bill Humphrey was one of the first deacons. Ella was mother of the church at Friendship.
Bill Humphrey died in 1927 in the winter time. It is believed that he was around 90 years old. Don Wright looks like him. He was tall and brown skinned. Bill became sick with pneumonia and died. He is buried at Union AME on the first line.
Ella died in 1938. She, too, is buried at Union AME Chirch cemetary, Clay County.
