Marion Mann

This book is Dedicated to the SENIOR MEMBERS of these families who had ancestor stories to tell and who shared the stories with me so that I could share them with you.

Also, dedicated to the CHILDREN who, in time, will be able to know the relationships between the ancestor stories and themselves.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE ......................... vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ... ix
FORMAT OF THIS BOOK ... xi
HISTORICAL SETTING ..... xiii
CHAPTER ONE
The Kigh Family ..... 1 CHAPTER TWO
The Mann Family ... 27 CHAPTER THREE
The Reagin Family .. 65 CHAPTER FOUR
The Sykes Family .... 103 PHOTOGRAPHS ............. 127
DOCUMENTS ................ 173
BIBLIOGRAPHY .............. 217

PREFACE
In September 1994, I decided to make a serious effort to compile a family history. My original plan was to complete the ancestry and descendants of my wife's parents, KIGH/REAGIN, and my parents, MANN/SYKES. I soon discovered the difficulties of tracing four separate family lines and, worse, of describing "interlacing" descendancies in an easy to understand format.

 I dealt with the interlacing descendancies problem in this way: Minnie Adelle (Kigh) Reagin is completely traced, not in the Kigh chapter, but in The Reagin Family chapter.
 Similarly, Cora Gertrude (Casey) Mann is followed, not in the Sykes chapter, but in The Mann Family.  Ruth (Reagin) Mann's family is treated, not as Reagin family, but as Mann family.

A major difficulty encountered was the lack of or scarcity of written records prior to 1865 (at the close of the Civil War). Slaves were forbidden by law to learn or be taught how to read and write, so they produced few written documents. The slave laws forbade legal marriages, so marriage documents as important evidence of family structure and parent-child identity are not frequently available to the researcher. Another major difficulty in assembling the data was my failure to present the proper questions to my relatives and to my wife's relatives now living.

Therefore this compilattion must be considered a work "still in progress." I print it now to avoid mislaying the papers and also to stimulate others to complete the work. I hope that, especially among younger members of the families, the effort will be continued to collect missing names, dates, and events. Much of the information is on the tongues of our contemporaries and we should exploit the opportunity to harvest it.

 All family members should appreciate that all our lives we have had in our midst a family griot (or the female equivalent) in the person of my wife, Ruth Reagin Mann.  She has supplied, out of her memory, a large part of the details concerning the Kighs and the Reagins, and even details of my own Mann family, told to her by my mother but previously unknown to me.

Marion Mann, MD