Ninety-nine years ago today, November 11, 1911 (yes, 11/11/11), my great-grandparents - Wiley Virgil Bird and Willie Ann Josephine Hunter - became man and wife in a civil ceremony in Huntsville, Alabama. Wiley was eighteen and Josie was seventeen (the couple had the same birthday, May 21, with only one year difference in their ages). Wiley was a native of Walker County, Georgia, and had settled in Madison County in 1902 after his father was shot and killed in a well dispute near Monrovia. Afterwards, he lived with his grandparents, who settled in the Big Cove Community in 1904. Josie was born in Grundy County, Tennessee, and settled in the Big Cove Community with her parents sometime just prior to 1900.
Their marriage would produce ten children and last thirty-five years, until Wiley's death in 1947, at the age of fifty-four years old. Josie survived her husband for thirty years, but never remarried. She passed away in 1977, at the age of eight-three, and was laid to rest beside of her late husband in the Neal's Chapel Cemetery in Big Cove, Alabama.
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