About Bendolph Family Legacy

Gee’s Bend sits inside a wide curve of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, part of the Black Belt of western Alabama. Since 1949 the post office has carried the name Boykin, but many people still know the community by its older name. Most of the people who live there today are descendants of enslaved African Americans. Like much of this part of the state, the community has faced long-standing poverty and a lack of economic opportunity. Yet it has built something lasting: a rich folk-art tradition, best known through its quilts, which have drawn national attention and praise. (Stevens, 2007)

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The land holds a long memory. Early settlers in Alabama built along the rivers, and in 1816 Joseph Gee, a landowner from Halifax County, North Carolina, settled inside this bend. He brought 18 enslaved people with him and started a cotton plantation. When he died, he left the property and 47 enslaved people to his nephews, Sterling and Charles Gee. In 1845 the brothers sold it to a relative, Mark H. Pettway, whose family name is still well known in Wilcox County. After emancipation, many freed people stayed and worked the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The Pettway family kept the land until 1895, when it was sold to Adrian Sebastian Van de Graaff, a Tuscaloosa attorney who ran it from a distance. (Stevens, 2007)

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Our story grows from that ground. Patrick Bendolph was born on October 8, 1901, and Ella Bendolph on May 4, 1904. Together they raised thirteen children: Atline, Delia, Addie, Rogis, Miller, Adolph, Jim, Herbert, Henderson, Raymond, Henry, Lucy and Laura. Patrick passed in May 1971 and Ella in July 1996, but the family they started kept growing. Their children had children, and so far we have recorded 48 grandchildren. The great-grandchildren and the generations after them are still being added.

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For us, family is more than a list of names. It’s the structure that holds everything up. Every Bendolph can trace a line back to Patrick and Ella, and that line is how we find each other, look after each other and pass our stories on.

Over the years the family has spread out. Many of us no longer live in Gee’s Bend, and Bendolph's have put down roots in Alabama, New York, Connecticut, Virginia, Georgia, California and many other places, with a good number along the eastern seaboard. But distance has never loosened the bond. Wherever we live, Gee’s Bend is still the place we call home, and the family stays close through phone calls, reunions and the stories we keep passing along.

 

Source: Stevens, Kyes. “Gee’s Bend.” Encyclopedia of Alabama, Auburn University, March 9, 2007. https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/gees-bend/