52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, Week 1 and 2

2023 Week 1  I'd Like to Meet

          Week 2  Favorite Photo

I am running late with Week 1 so I have decided to combine Week 1 with Week 2.

      I would like to meet my paternal Grandmother, Emma Collins Francis Booksh. She is the only one of my grandparents that I mever met. I know a lot about her, but I'd like to have known her personally.

     One of my favorite photos of her is this one of Grandma Emma with her first born, my father Wilton Tisdale Booksh Jr., and her mother, Anna Belle Collins Francis, and grandmother, Emma Louise Chalfant Collins, taken by my grandfather, Wilton Tisdale Booksh Sr., on the day of my father's baptism on 21 October 1913 in New Orleans.

     Emma was born on 11 August 1888 at China Grove Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. She was the oldest daughter of Charles Alfred Francis and Anna Belle Collins. Emma and her two sisters and her brother were all born at China Grove Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish. One of the questions I'd like to ask her is why her mother traveled up river from their home in New Orleans to give birth in Pointe Coupee.

     Her mother, Anna Belle Collins, was born on 10 March 1866 in Collin County, Texas, but on the 1870 census she is listed at age 4 living with her father and mother, Foster Collins and Emma Collins, and two siblings in the household of her uncle Charles Chalfant in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Great Grandmother Anna Belle's mother, Great Great Grandmother Emma Louise Chalfant, was born in Pointe Coupee Parish circa 1846. In the 1880 census she is listed at age 30 in Pointe Coupee with her husband J. F. Collins. Emma Louise's father, Nathaniel Chalfant, is listed as a Planter in Pointe Coupee Parish in 1860 and her mother, Drucilla Burrows Chalfant, died in Pointe Coupee. These are the only connections I have been able to find in the family to Pointe Coupee.

     I am assuming the China Grove Plantation in Pointe Coupee was the home of Emma Louise's parents, Nathaniel Chalfant (1795-1869) and Drucilla Caroline Burrows (1813-1865). That's what I'm assuming, but if I could meet Grandma Emma I could ask her.

     And I would also like to ask her if these two unidentified Daguerreotypes from my Great Grandma Belle Tisdale's photo collection are of Nathaniel Chalfant and Drucilla Burrows.