Bessie Lee Fulton
Today is the Fourth of July and an ancestral anniversary. I have a general sense of indifference to the American Independence Day as my ancestors were not free and still are not free and there is no true independence on stolen land. However, today is the 111th birthday of my great great grandmother Bessie Lee Fulton. Bessie was born on July 4, 1904 somewhere in Ohio, to James Van Fulton and Mamie E. Dantzler, the youngest of two daughters (her older sister being Ollie Bell Fulton). At some point, the Fultons moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina not far from Kings Mountain, North Carolina, where James was born and raised. Bessie (second row, first on the left) with her first grade class, Spartanburg SC, ca. 1910 Bessie spent her early childhood in South Carolina before moving to West Philadelphia as a teenager with her family in the late 1910s. It was in Philadelphia where she would meet her husband, Frederick Morris Young. They got married on September 8, 1...