The Chelsey and Sarah A. Waller Family

Chelsey and Sarah A. Waller

Chelsey and Sarah A. Waller were married in 1873. Little is known about Chelsey Waller's early years, except that he was born circa April 1845. Sarah A. Waller (May 1851-Dec. 30, 1947) was born into slavery, as granddaughter, Beulah Christian Scott, recalls in an oral history:

"There's a farm where my grandmother was born as a slave. She was 16 years old when the Civil War ended. So it was the Curtises that owned her...She never did take the slave name... They taught her to read and to write. She stayed in and took care of the children in the big house."

Source: Beulah Christian Scott (1991;84)

After the Civil War, Sarah went to Chester, Pennsylvania. However, she was in contact with Chelsey, and the two corresponded. Eventually, Sarah came back to Virginia and married Chelsey, having never met him before in person. As granddaughter Beulah Christian Scott recalled:

"That was true love."

Chelsey became a farmer and oysterer in the Reservation. Chelsey and Sarah Waller had fourteen children, eight of whom were living in 1900 according to census records: William, Mary, John, Sarah, Aaron, Jerry, Moses, and Lucy.

According to an oral history by granddaughter Beulah Christian Scott, Chelsey Waller played a role in the founding of Rising Sun Baptist Church, which Beulah Christian Scott, her parents, and siblings frequented.

Source: Beulah Christian Scott (1991:86)

Chelsey Waller died on April 26, 1917 and was buried in the Rising Sun Baptist Church cemetery.

Source: Virginia Department of Health; Richmond, Virginia; Virginia Deaths, 1912-2014. Available: Ancestry.com

Edgar E. and Sarah (Waller) Christian

One of Chelsey and Sarah Waller's children, Sarah, (born circa 1889) married Edgar E. Christian.

According to the 1900 Federal Census, Edgar Christian was born circa March 1885 to James and Emily Christian in the Lackey neighborhood in the Reservation. Edgar had ten siblings: Mary, Lucy, Robert, Philip, Wesley, Martha, Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca, and Horace. In 1900, it appears that the family was living with Edgar's uncle and aunt, James and Mary Edwards, according to census records; however, Beulah Christian Scott recalled in an oral history that her father's parents, James and Emily, had two houses in the Reservation by 1920.

Sarah and Edgar married and had five children: Amos, Beulah, Russell, James, and Lenora.

This is the birth certificate of their daughter, Beulah, who was born on December 3, 1913 with the support of Emily Christian, a midwife and likely Edgar's mother.

Beulah Christian, birth certificate
Source: Virginia Department of Health; Richmond, Virginia; Virginia, Births, 1864-2015

Edgar Christian was an oysterer and a farmer, and Sarah Christian tended the house and supported the farming and oystering enterprises.

Scroll through these images to read Ms. Beulah Christian Scott's recollections of life on the farm with her parents and the mischief she got into with her brother:

Beulah Christian Scott describes the precious family and community life she experienced as a child in the Reservation:

"Everybody'd sit around the dinner table and we'd find out 'what'd you do today?'... we taught poems and we taught the Bible, and this is what we'd do in the evenings because everybody was home. Then on the weekends...they could visit the neighbors and go with the other kids...And then we went to church and we'd go to different church socials or whatever they had programs in and things like that."

Source: Beulah Christian Scott (1991; 86)

While the majority of families living in the Reservation were Black, Beulah Christian Scott recalls living close to the Ripply family, a white family. She played with their children, but remembers that as children, "we just couldn't understand why we couldn't go to school together."

When the family was forced by the U.S. government to relocate, they moved "across the road" to what is now the Lackey community. Beulah Christian Scott recalls the disruptions that her family faced:

"They didn't pay him [my father] anything for it. So many people they didn't pay anything for, they just moved them out and they had to just cut branches off the trees and make, they used to call them "brush hoven" and live there. They just moved them out...And my father wasn't compensated at all."

Source: Beulah Christian Scott (1991:86, 85)

She recalls that her paternal grandparents, James and Emily Christian, moved one of their houses from the Reservation to Lackey during the displacement:

"My grandmother on my father's side, they had two houses in [the Reservation], but they did move...the smaller house, they moved that out across the road."

Source: Beulah Christian Scott (1991:85)

Sources:

Ancestry.com. 1910 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch.
Virginia Department of Health; Richmond, Virginia; Virginia, Births, 1864-2015
Scott, Beulah Christian. 1991. Oral History. In McDonald, Bradley M., Kenneth Stuck, and Kathleen J. Bragdon. 1992. “Cast Down Your Bucket Where You Are”: An Ethnohistorical Study of the African American Community on the Lands of the Yorktown Naval Weapons Station, 1865-1918. Williamsburg: William & Mary Center for Archaeological Research.

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