My Irish and Native American Great-Grandmother
This photo, taken in Chicago in 1937, is of Jannie Scott-Campbell, my great-grandmother.
Jannie Scott was born in Wilmington, North Carolina In November 1879. She was the only child born to James and Anna Winston-Scott. Her father, James Scott, was Scots-Irish, while her mother, Anna, was Cherokee Indian.
Jannie Scott met and married my great-grandfather, Calvin C. Campbell, in January 1898 in North Carolina. (The name Campbell was given to a group of slaves bought in Tennessee from a slave owner. When the sale took place the slaves were transported to Arkansas by the new owner, a man named Campbell. The year was 1852 or 1853. This sale separated them from countless close relatives left behind. There is of course much more to the story.)
Jannie Scott and Calvin Campbell lived in Augusta Township, Woodruff County, Arkansas. Their occupation was tenant farming.
Their first child, William Henry Louis Campbell III, was born in December 1898.
William Campbell III, my grandfather, married Henrietta (Amos) Campbell, my grandmother, in December 1922. They had five children, one of whom was my mother, Esther.
My mother Esther Henrietta Campbell met my father, Clayton James Anderson, who was born and raised in Toronto, Canada (he was descended from whites and a black slave). His parents were Loretta (Wilson) Anderson and Clarence Anderson, and he was the first of three children.
My mother and father were married in Chicago in January 1943, six weeks before he left to begin service in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during World War II.
I was the third of four children from the marriage of Esther and Clayton.
My great-grandparents, Calvin Campbell and Jannie Scott Campbell, both died in 1949, six months apart, of cancer.
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Edited selections from "The Campbell-Anderson Family History," researched and written by Esther Anderson based on materials and photographs she preserved, and greatly expanded with additional photographs and essays by Marc P. Anderson.
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