This is an article I never expected to write. My interest in Scott Joplin was originally centered on his music; examination of his life came later, and I was pleased to discover how details of his life added to the understanding of his music. Thoughts of his parents rarely surfaced. I accepted the little that was written about them and didn’t bother to examine the stories carefully. My thoughts changed a year ago when my daughter Stephanie Caputo, an amateur – though expert – genealogist, showed me what she had discovered about the parents. This was new and intriguing information. I agreed that we should follow her line of investigation and see where it leads.
Previous Writings about Scott Joplin’s Parents
Examination of Scott Joplin or his family inevitably begins with Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis. Their book They All Played Ragtime (1950; 3rd ed. 1971) was the pioneering work on ragtime and Scott Joplin. But they had little to say about Joplin’s parents. They have Giles (also spelled Jiles) Joplin born into slavery in North Carolina and Florence being free-born in Kentucky. Except for the assertion of Florence being free-born, this information is readily available on Scott Joplin’s census listings beginning in 1870 and other places. An article that Blesh wrote for the New York Public Library edition of The Complete Works of Scott Joplin (1971; 2nd ed. 1981) gives us an additional piece of tantalizing information. He informs us that the parents were musical, that Giles played the violin and was a dance musician and that Florence sang and played banjo. Blesh did not indicate his source of this information, but it probably came from Scott Joplin’s widow, Lottie Joplin (Rudi Blesh, “Scott Joplin: Black-American Classicist,” xiv). Should these assertions be true, the musicality of the parents reflects on at least three of their children, Scott, Robert, and William. All three were quartet singers, and, in addition, Scott played piano, cornet, violin, and mandolin, and Robert was a professional singer, guitarist, and champion cakewalker. Robert’s daughter Essie D. (also spelled SCD) was a music teacher and a singer in a female quartet.
James Haskins and Kathleen Benson, in their Scott Joplin biography Scott Joplin. The Man Who Made Ragtime (1978), attempted to discover more about the parents. Their findings suggested hypotheses that seemed reasonable. Although they worked decades before the advent of online search engines and easy access to documents, they found an 1850 slave census from Bowie County, Texas, that includes an enslaved six-year-old boy named Jiles belonging to Charles Moores (pp. 22-23; his name appears in several other documents as Moore; this slave census seems to be alone in spelling his name with a final “s”). This slave census is a rarity in that it includes the names of those enslaved; generally, the only name in a slave census is that of the slave owner. Those enslaved remain nameless and are listed only by age, gender, and color.
The earliest documented reference to Giles Joplin and his family has them in Cass County which, during the Civil War, was temporarily renamed Davis County, in honor of Jefferson Davis, president of the Southern Confederacy. A few years after the Civil War, the county name reverted to Cass. As the Joplin family was later to move to Bowie County, to the newly founded town of Texarkana, Haskins suggests that this child was the Jiles who was to become Scott Joplin’s father. If that were so, we are left with the question as to why this Jiles, when freed, had not followed the common practice of adopting the surname of his former owner, becoming Jiles Moores. If he had done so, his son, the King of Ragtime Writers, would have been not Scott Joplin, but Scott Moores! Haskins proposes an explanation for how Giles chose the name of Joplin, acknowledging that it’s speculative. A few miles from where Moores lived was the home of Warren Hooks, whose daughter Minerva married a man named Josiah Joplin. Haskins suggests that Jiles was given to Minerva as a wedding gift, and that upon being freed, Jiles adopted the Joplin name. Haskins acknowledges a possible flaw in his theory as he had not discovered the date of Minerva’s marriage.
Haskins was correct about this flaw to his theory. The book The Jopling–Joplin Family with Some of Their Connections in England and America (Dorothy Jopling Eason, et al.; the book can be accessed at https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/), published in Texarkana in 1979, reveals (p. 281) that Josiah Joplin had been in the Confederate Army, was captured, held in a Union prisoner-of-war camp, and moved to Bowie County in 1866. He married Minerva Hooks in 1867, two years after the Civil War had ended. Therefore, the Jiles who had belonged to Moores is not likely to have still been enslaved and could not have been given to Minerva and Josiah as a wedding gift.
Further evidence that Scott Joplin’s father was not the Jiles who had been owned by Charles Moores is found in an article reprinted in the Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock) in September, 1918 (having probably originated in the Texarkana Gazette). In this article, Giles Joplin, the authenticated father of Scott Joplin, revealed that his former owner was Berry Hodge:
Negro Says He Was 56 Years of Age in 1860.
Special to the Gazette.
Texarkana, Sept. 2.–Among those registered by the Public Service Reserve Board on the Arkansas side of town during the past week was Giles Joplin, a negro, who gave his age as 114 years. He declares he was 56 years old in 1860, when Lincoln was elected president, at which time he was living with his master, a man named Berry Hodge, in Cass county [sic], Texas, about 40 miles from here. His master went to the war, he said, and lost his life on the battlefield. Joplin looks old and is very gray, but he can see and hear well and is as active as the average man of 70. He says he has lived in Kentucky most of the time after he was freed, but he came to Texarkana seven or eight years ago and is making his home with his granddaughter on College Hill.
While all who have seen the old darky agree that he is a very old man, many are skeptical at the claim that he is a centenarian.
Some of Giles’s assertions are definitely incorrect, some questionable, some possibly true. We don’t know if he was purposely dissembling or if his memory was failing and he was confused.
Where Giles Lived after Emancipation
Giles’s statement that he had lived in Kentucky most years after emancipation and first moved to Texarkana a little after 1910 is demonstrably incorrect. Post-Civil War state and federal documents, city directories, and comments of those who knew him, place him in Texas and Arkansas for most—perhaps all—of his life after emancipation.
The first sign of Giles as a free man is in August, 1867, when he was entered into the voter registration and poll tax rolls of Davis County, Texas. He said at the time of his voter registration that he had been in the county for twelve years, which would have been around 1855.
Giles appears in the census by name for the first time in 1870. He was living in Davis County with his wife Florence and three sons: Monroe, Scott, and Robert. Giles lists his age as twenty-eight and his birth place as North Carolina; Florence lists herself as age twenty-nine, born in Kentucky. Scott Joplin’s marriage record from 1913, when he married Lottie Stokes, contains the information that his mother’s maiden name was Givens. The maiden name is significant because Milton and Susan Givens are listed in the census immediately above the Joplins, indicating they were neighbors; their common name and proximity have led biographers to assume them to be Florence’s parents.
The census shows that Giles and Milton were both farm workers, which was true of most of the men in the area. A tax record from 1871, that apparently shows Giles and Milton working together on the same farm, is puzzling. Milton’s name – at the bottom of the list – is not Milton Givens, but Milton Hodge. This last name suggests that Milton had been enslaved by both a Givens and Berry Hodge, and either he used both names for a while after emancipation, or some people in the area mistakenly assumed he used Hodge as his last name. In 1872, his name was changed on tax records to Givens.
Another implication of Milton having the alternate name of Hodge is that he and Giles, both having been enslaved by Hodge, may have been friends. As friends, they might have chosen to be neighbors, regardless of whether there was a family relationship.
A more puzzling issue is the first name of the Joplin worker, a line above Milton’s. The name is not Giles, but Silas. For the next few years, county tax records – but only tax records – include the name Silas Joplin and not Giles Joplin. All non-tax records have only Giles, never Silas. The 1867 poll tax roll reveals the cause of the error. The capital “G” for Giles in the handwritten record can easily be misinterpreted as an “S”. This error was retained in tax records until 1872, when it was corrected.
Giles last appears on the Cass County tax records in 1878. The following year, he is on the Bowie County tax rolls, as the family had moved to the Texas side of Texarkana. The 1880 census shows the family in Texarkana, now enlarged with the births of three more children: Osie, William, and Johnny. (The census that year asked whether the person listed had measles, and it was answered positively for several children in the neighborhood, including the three youngest Joplin children. As we never again hear of Johnny, he may have succumbed to the disease around that time. Florence, in her 1900 census listing, claimed she had had fourteen births, of which only six of her children reached adulthood.) Sometime after the 1880 census was taken, the family moved across the border to the Arkansas side of Texarkana, where Myrtle was born, probably in early 1882.
Giles left the family soon after moving to the Arkansas side of Texarkana. He lived with his son Robert in Waco, Texas in 1892. In 1893, he married Laura Roberts and moved back to Texarkana, Arkansas. That marriage lasted for about a decade before they separated and Giles moved out. For the rest of his life, he lived primarily with relatives in Texarkana and, for a short time around 1917, with his daughter Myrtle Brooks and her husband in Little Rock, Arkansas; he then returned to Texarkana. His assertion that he lived most of his emancipated years in Kentucky is clearly false.
Giles’s Age
As records were not usually kept of births of those enslaved, precise ages are rarely possible to determine. Giles’s family apparently believed what he said in the newspaper article of his extremely advanced age. His son Monroe, who provided information for his death certificate (Sept. 4, 1922), indicated Giles’s age as “100 or more”; an unnamed nephew told researcher Jerry Atkins that Giles died at age 114 (Rag Times, Sept. 1972, p. 2.). However, Giles’s census listings provide a much younger age: 1870, age 28; 1880, age 38; 1900, age 60. These would suggest a birth year of around 1840-42. In 1918, the year of the article, he would have been in his mid to late 70s, in line with the age suggested in the newspaper. At time of death, in 1922, he would have been in his early 80s. The statement he made about his age in the newspaper article is clearly untrue.
Giles’s Enslavement
Naming Berry Hodge as his one-time owner seems to be correct. Hodge, born around 1797–98 in North Carolina in a large family of wealthy slave holders, moved to Union County, Kentucky by around 1800, and by the 1840s was living in Paducah (McCracken County), Kentucky. The number of slaves he owned ranged between thirty and forty-two, as documented in his 1854, 1857 and 1861 tax assessments and in the 1850 and 1860 slave census. He was also part owner in the Paducah Cotton Factory Company and owned other land in the area. In December 1852, he moved from Kentucky to Cass County, Texas. Had Giles been a band musician for Hodge, this would have been particularly significant. A book published in 1886, History of Union County, Kentucky (available at www.google.com/books) relates how slave musicians might play to exhaustion at wedding celebrations, some of which lasted for days (pp. 15–18). Giles would have been too young for the activities in Union, but should the practices have continued after Hodge’s move to Paducah and then to Texas, Giles could have participated as a musician.
Speaking of Hodge more than five decades after the end of the Civil War, Giles made one error about his former owner, confusing Berry Hodge with his son Robert Blount Hodge. Berry Hodge was over sixty when the Civil War began and did not serve in the military. It was his son Robert who, at age seventeen in October 1861, had enlisted in the Confederate army and perished in action in July 1864.
We wonder if Giles’s son Robert B. Joplin, who usually used his middle initial without indicating what the initial stood for, had been named for Berry Hodge’s son Robert Blount Hodge. Should that have been the case, it could reflect upon the relationship Giles had with Berry Hodge or his son. We are also left with the question as to why Giles, on being freed, had not chosen Hodge as his surname. Had he done so, the King of Ragtime Writers would have been not Scott Joplin, but Scott Hodge!
Berry Hodge was a significant figure in Giles’s life, and there may have been some carry-over to Giles’s son, the King of Ragtime Writers. But whereas our interest in Hodge is in his connection to the Joplin family, his name lives on to this day in another context. One of Hodge’s Texas plantations is now a county, state, and national landmark. (See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hodge_Plantation.JPG ; https://catalog.archives.gov/id/40972908 .)
Giles Adopts the Joplin Name
The issue of Giles’s choice of the Joplin name is addressed in the article “Rags of the Master” (Texas Historian, September 1978). It was written by Marsha Stone, a high school student in Jefferson (Marion County), Texas. On p. 24, she wrote:
His [Scott Joplin’s] father, Jiles (not Giles) Joplin, was listed in the 1860 United States Slave Census as belonging to a plantation owner in Cass County, Texas. Possibly the planter was white landowner, M. W. Joplin, who lived near the Kildare community. Area historians believe that Jiles Joplin, upon emancipation, probably adopted his former master’s name.
As presented in the above quotation, the suggestion that Jiles had been owned by M. W. Joplin fails to withstand scrutiny. Even if the 1860 slave census cited broke with the usual practice of leaving the enslaved nameless, there is no evidence that this Jiles was Scott Joplin’s father. In addition, slave censuses are listings and enumerations of the slave holdings of specific owners; as already shown above, without an owner’s name, there is no listing. Identifying M. W. Joplin as “possibly” being the owner strongly suggests that the author had not actually seen the slave census she cites. Furthermore, as far as we can determine, M. W. Joplin, who lists his occupation as “Negro Trader” in the 1860 census and the owner of six, unnamed slaves, was not even in Cass County in 1860. He, his wife Delila, and their children are included in the 1860 census in the town of Sherman (Grayson County), Texas, some 160 miles from Cass, and he is still listed there in the 1863 tax rolls. In addition, a memoir from 1880, describing the town of Sherman in 1861, places Mark Joplin still in town: “In the center of the block stood the ‘iron post grocery,’ the vilest hole in town, where M. W. Joplin and his son, Buck, ruled supreme” (reprinted as “What a 16-Year Old Boy Saw in Sherman in 1861,” The Sherman Courier, Aug. 15, 1917, section 3, p. 1.) (The Iron Post Grocery referred to in the quotation was not a grocery, but a saloon. We don’t know why it was called a grocery, but the name “Iron Post” comes from two iron posts in front that supported the second floor. It was a hangout of some of the most notorious outlaws of the Old West and was the site of numerous murders. That Mark Joplin and his son “ruled supreme” there tells us something about the man’s character. I thank Sherry Little, of the Old Iron Post Restaurant in Sherman, Texas, for this information.) Mark Joplin was not in Cass County until 1863, so he could not have been a slave holder in the 1860 Cass County slave census. Marsha Stone’s argument clearly fails examination.
But the proposal that M. W. Joplin had been an owner of Scott Joplin’s father is not without merit. There was a connection between Mark W. Joplin and one of Berry Hodge’s daughters. In December 1852, when Berry Hodge was about to move his family from Paducah, Kentucky, to Cass County, Texas, his sixteen-year-old daughter Ann Ellen Hodge eloped with John Smedley (age 23). Berry Hodge quickly found the newly-weds and demanded that his daughter return home, which she refused to do. He then hit Smedley over the head with a hickory stick. In response, Smedley shot Hodge in the arm. That ended the matter, and Hodge left. The next day, Hodge moved the rest of his family to Texas (Courier Journal, Louisville, KY, Dec. 13, 1852).
Apparently, there was a reconciliation of sorts, for the 1860 census shows the Smedleys had moved to Texas, about 17 miles from the Hodge family: the Hodges were in the Linden post office district of Cass County, Texas, and the Smedleys were in the Jefferson post office district of the neighboring Marion County. The 1860 census listing for the Smedleys contains a few details that might refer to the nature of the reconciliation. It includes questions of real estate and personal wealth. John Smedley’s entry, which lists him as a farmer, does not indicate any real estate or personal wealth, whereas his wife has real estate valued at $1,200 and a personal estate of $2,907. Her real estate holdings and her personal estate suggest that Berry Hodge had provided for his daughter, insisting that her wealth remain in her name. A Marion County real estate sales record confirms that the land was transferred from Berry Hodge to his daughter: “. . . three hundred and eight acres of land formerly sold by Matt Wind to Berry Hodge & transferred by said Hodge to me and occupied by me and my Husband John C. Smedley in AD 1861 as our homestead” (p. 152). Their tax assessments for 1855 and 1856 indicate they had no slaves, but the 1860 slave census shows they had acquired three slaves – two females, ages 47 and 16, and a 23-year-old man. The male slave’s age is close to what Giles’s age would have been. As Giles had been owned by Hodge, we wonder if Giles could have been the Smedley family’s male slave.
A convoluted succession of actions involving a land transfer, a fraudulent land sale, and lawsuits – one heard in the Texas Supreme Court – follows. As the details are not directly relevant to our narrative, except for one final revelation, we will summarize. (The Texas Supreme Court case is “Delilah Joplin v. Jacob W. Fleming,” Cases Argued and Decided in The Supreme Court of Texas . . . term of 1873, pp. 526–530. All other documents spell Delilah’s name without the final “h”.) In 1862, after John Smedley had left home to fight for the Confederacy, Ann Smedley exchanged their land with that of another local landowner, Jacob Fleming, and then occupied Fleming’s former home. But Fleming did not occupy the former Smedley home; instead, he moved to San Antonio, Texas, leaving the former Smedley home empty. With the home being empty, early in 1865 Ann Smedley fraudulently sold her former home, along with two unnamed slaves, to Mark W. Joplin. This information comes from the Texas Supreme Court record of 1873. Since this record was after the Civil War, there is no mention of slaves. However, Mark Joplin, in 1865, was being divorced by his wife Delila, and one of the divorce records – an agreement on the issue of alimony – names the slaves. Delila signed an agreement to forego alimony in favor of receiving the home, a horse, two cows, and the slaves – here named for the first time as “the Negro boy Giles and the Negro woman Josephine.” (The term “boy” should not be understood as referring only to a child. Black men were routinely called “boy”.) Here is an excerpt from the agreement:
. . . whereas the said Delila Joplin and the said M. W. Joplin, have by mutual consent and agreement settled the question of property involved in said suit and in pursuance of said agreement the said Delila Joplin obligates and binds herself to dismiss her said application for alimony, as also her prayer and application for injunction and in consideration thereof the said M. W. Joplin, hereby gives and settles upon her during her natural life, the Negro boy Giles and the Negro woman Josephine, one average horse and one cow and calf, together with the Homestead place, situated in said County of Marion and commonly known as the Smedley place. . . [The Supreme Court summary incorrectly states that the agreement was made “about December of that year,” but the signed agreement shows the date of April 7, 1865. Delila signed with an “X”, indicating she was unable to sign her name.]
We now have evidence for the source of Giles’s surname. Marsha Stone, the high school student who suggested in her 1978 article that M. W. Joplin was this source was correct, even if her evidence and reasoning were faulty. Although the inference that the Giles who had been owned by Delila Joplin was the father of Scott Joplin is not absolute, that conclusion is convincing. As the freed Giles Joplin had referred to his owner as Berry Hodge, it would seem that Giles had been given (or sold) by Hodge to his daughter Ann Smedley, who owned him for about five years before selling him to Mark W. Joplin, along with the land that he purchased in the fraudulent sale. Mark Joplin gave Giles to his wife Delila as part of their divorce settlement, perhaps suspecting that the Civil War was soon to end and that slavery might end with it. As the agreement between Mark and Delila Joplin took place a mere two days before the end of the Civil War, Delila probably owned Giles for only a few months, perhaps until “Juneteenth” (June 19, 1865), when the Union army occupied Galveston, Texas, and announced that all slaves had been freed.
We wonder why Giles, having been owned for such a short time by Mark and Delila Joplin, probably less than a year, assumed the Joplin name. Whereas many of the formerly enslaved adopted the names of their former owners, there was no set rule about the practice. Delila, or her former husband, may have given Giles their surname as a form of showing ownership, but there was nothing to prevent Giles from discarding that name. Freedmen could choose any surname.
Questions about Scott Joplin’s Mother
Consideration of Scott Joplin’s mother brings new questions and surprises. As the 1870 census lists Milton and Susan Givens immediately before the Joplins, suggesting they were neighbors, and as Scott Joplin’s 1913 marriage document lists his mother’s maiden name as Givens, biographers have assumed that Milton and Susan Givens were Florence’s parents. That’s an easy and obvious assumption, but a newly discovered fact makes us pause: when Berry Hodge married in 1833, it was to a Union County woman named Susan Slye Givens, almost the identical name as the assumed mother of Florence. This discovery demands that we learn about this white Givens family from Union County.
The book Some Webster County, Kentucky, Families. Baker, Bassett, Givens, Johnson, Payne, Price, Rice, and Others (1983), lists and discusses many dozens – perhaps hundreds – of Givens in that part of the state. (Webster County borders on Union County.) Discussion of Givens families accounts for almost 20% of the book.
Susan Slye Givens, the wife of Berry Hodge, was the daughter of Samuel Givens (1769–1830). Samuel Givens was a merchant, not a farmer. Although he was wealthy and owned slaves, he did not need the labor of a great number of slaves; he probably rented his slaves out. In 1820, he owned fifteen slaves (as compared to the 30 to 42 owned by Berry Hodge); in 1821, he freed one of his slaves. Samuel Givens was an extremely prominent citizen, involved in numerous county affairs. In 1825 he prepared a will in which he specified bequests for the five children from his second marriage: two thousand dollars when they marry or reach the age of 21, and $300 per year until they should marry or reach the age of 21. These children were George Washington Givens (1806–1890), Nathaniel Franklin Givens (1808–1888), Samuel Slye Givens (1810–1857), Susan Slye Givens (1811–1885), and Minerva A. Givens (1816–1892). (One of the sons from his first marriage had died in 1823; the other, Thomas Jefferson Givens, was already married and settled, as were two older daughters.) His slaves were to be distributed among all his children.
The family’s next generation, despite being raised in a culture of slavery, owned far fewer slaves, suggesting that they were not needed. From Samuel’s second marriage, George Washington Givens was living in New Orleans. In 1850, he had two slaves, a male, age 45, and a female, age 27; in 1860, he worked as a school teacher and had no slaves.
Nathaniel Franklin Givens, a lawyer, moved to Missouri in 1840 and had no slaves. The 1850 census shows him married with his wife, two young children, and one slave – a 16-year-old female, who probably took care of the children, among other duties. By 1860, he had several more children, real estate valued at $8,000, and a personal estate of $2,000. He had one slave, a boy of age 13.
Samuel Slye Givens had left Kentucky for Calhoun, Texas by 1849. He gave Berry Hodge – his sister’s husband and owner of Giles – power-of-attorney over two tracts of land in Paducah. The 1850 census shows Samuel as a merchant with three slaves. By 1851, he was already a prominent citizen in Calhoun County, becoming postmaster that year and then again in 1856. He died the following year in a boating accident.
Had Scott Joplin’s mother, Florence, been born to an enslaved woman in one of these Givens branches, it’s easy to see that she could have been emancipated at birth, supporting the story that she was free-born.
Widespread Use of the Givens Name
Though Kentucky was a slave state and the governor sided with the Confederacy, the state’s legislature chose to remain with the Union. Some 35,000 Kentuckians elected to serve in the Confederate army during the Civil War. In comparison, about 125,000 served with the Union, including about 24,000 Black Kentuckians. In an 1867 listing of Black Kentuckians who served in the U. S. Army, I counted at least thirty-four named Givens. Another list (ca. 1864), of both white and Black Kentuckians subject to military service, Kentucky’s Second District (see illustration) includes nine Blacks named Givens, owned (or formerly owned) by four different slave owners named Givens. Two names stood out as I examined this list: Peter Givens (line 11 in the illustration) and Abraham Givens (line 21). Peter Givens, who was enlisted in the U.S. Colored Troops 5th Cavalry, had been enslaved by E. A. Givens, one of Samuel Givens’s brothers. Peter had a son, also named Peter Givens, who became a ragtime pianist associated with legendary ragtime pianist and singer Tony Jackson, composer of the song “Pretty Baby” (Blesh and Janis, 173). So, Florence was not the only Givens from the area to raise a notable ragtimer.
The other Givens who caught my eye is Paducah-born Abraham Givens (line 21), who had been owned by Martha Givens (who was the widow of the grandson of one of Samuel Givens’s brothers). It turns out there were at least two Black men from the area named Abe Givens, and the person on the military list was not the one I had in mind. I had noted in my Scott Joplin biography (King of Ragtime. Scott Joplin and His Era, 2nd ed., pp. 152-53) that the composer, when living in St. Louis (1901-1907), occasionally visited the nearby community of North Webster, part of Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. North Webster had been settled primarily by Black Americans, and Abe Givens was known as a long-term resident. I speculated that Abe Givens may have had a connection with Scott Joplin’s mother Florence Givens, providing a reason for the composer’s visits to the area. If that were the case, it might have provided the composer with an opening to North Webster’s social life; Sarah Simms, another North Webster resident, had been a girlfriend of Joplin’s (Ann Morris and Henrietta Ambrose, North Webster. A Photographic History of a Black Community, 1993, pp. 6, 117).
The discovery that the Givens name was so common among the formerly enslaved (as well as enslavers) in that area raises questions as to whether the assumption of Florence being the daughter of her neighbor Susan Givens is correct. It might be correct, but neither the common surname nor the proximity of living next door to the Joplins is proof.
But can we even be sure that Florence’s maiden name was Givens, as indicated on Scott Joplin’s marriage document? Scott’s brother William married Louise Girley in Detroit on November 18, 1924, and the marriage record includes his mother’s maiden name not as Florence Givens, but as Florence Hicks. The names of his bride’s parents (James H Gurley and Mary Beachem) are not included, which suggests that the information was provided by William. We don’t have any evidence to conclude which brother gave the accurate information. That William’s father was listed as Charles indicates that William provided the information verbally and that “Charles” was probably a mis-hearing of “Giles”.
The rest of Florence’s history is uneventful in considering her parentage or emancipation. The 1900 census shows Florence still in the family home in Texarkana, living with her daughters Myrtle and Osie and three female boarders. Myrtle married Charles Brooks in 1901 and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas; Florence either moved with them or followed shortly afterwards. In the 1906 Little Rock directory, Florence indicated she was Giles’s widow, although he still lived; it was a common practice of the time for women to claim widowhood rather than acknowledge divorce or separation. Florence died in Little Rock on July 7, 1911. Her will distributed $125 among her children.
Our review of Florence Joplin leaves many more questions than our history of Giles. Although important aspects of her life remain unproven, I still have opinions about them. I think her maiden name was Givens and not Hicks, and she was linked, in some way, to the extended family of Samuel Givens. This Givens family’s relative lack of interest in holding many slaves might support the undocumented anecdote of her being free born. I have not reached an opinion on whether she was the daughter of Milton and Susan Givens; with so many people in the area bearing the Givens surname, I am not convinced that living next door to the Joplins proves that Florence was their daughter.
Improved access to historic documents and newspapers enabled us to discover facts that would have been far less accessible a few decades ago. However helpful these historic materials are, they are not flawless. Errors appear in historic newspapers and official government documents, with handwriting in the latter being subject to possible misinterpretations. We are also confronted with flawed memories, misspelled names, missing documents, and puzzling information. Still, piecing together these frequently incomplete bits of information allows us to reconstruct, to some extent, the lives of people otherwise lost to history.
Scott Joplin’s parents are peripheral to our interest in the composer; at most, information about them might provide insights into his early life and influences. Whereas we have uncovered some surprising and potentially valuable information about the Joplin family, certain areas remain vague, suggested only by way of unsupported anecdotes, such as Giles’s supposed participation in pre-emancipation musical activities; such information, if we could obtain it, would certainly reflect on Scott Joplin’s musical development. With online databases being updated almost daily, this lacuna might eventually be filled. We don’t expect our new narrative to be the last word on Scott Joplin’s parents.
The genealogical and historic research for this article was done mostly by my daughter Stephanie Caputo, whose diligence has rescued from obscurity these issues concerning the parents of Scott Joplin.
Copyright © 2024 by Edward A. Berlin
Website https://www.edwardaberlin.com/
Ed Berlin is author of King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era, now in its second edition, and many other writings on ragtime and other musical topics.
Stephanie Caputo, one of Ed’s daughters, did most of the research for this article. Much of what she discovered is new, not previously seen by any modern researcher.
