Charlotte Thomas Marshall
Charlotte Thomas Marshall is a native of Donalsonville, Georgia and a 1963 graduate of Wesleyan College, who came to Athens in January 1966 as an admissions counselor for the University of Georgia. That fall she met Dr. George O. Marshall, Jr., a professor of English and president of the Athens Historical Society. He introduced her at the January 1967 meeting as his fiancée and the Society’s newest member; they married two months later. Through the family of his first wife, Marion West Marshall, Charlotte was first introduced to Oconee Hill Cemetery and Athens history. Several years later when the Athens Junior Assembly, now a Junior League, assigned her the project of researching the history of their newly acquired Taylor-Grady House she discovered her calling in historical research. She is particularly indebted to the early mentoring of Susan Frances Barrow Tate, Ruby Robison West, Frances West Reid, and Mary Claire Bondurant Warren.
During the past fifty years she has been active in many areas of Athens life. She is deacon emeritus First Baptist Church; past president of Athens Historical Society, Junior League of Athens, and the board of Boys Club of Athens; a founder of Friends of Oconee Hill Cemetery; member of the Ladies Garden Club, Glenwood Garden Club, and University Woman’s Club; a frequent lecturer and conductor of cemetery walks; author of “Glimpses of the Antebellum History of Athens Baptist Church,” Historic Houses of Athens, Georgia (1987) and Oconee Hill Cemetery of Athens, Georgia , Volume I, (2009) along with a number of articles. In 1996 Charlotte and George edited Susan Frances Barrow Tate’s Remembering Athens. They also assisted Ruth Roberson Hughes in compiling and publishing The History and People of St. Luke A.M.E. Church in 2007. Earlier in 2002 she was a contributor to Gary L. Doster’s A Post Card History of Athens, Georgia.
In connection with her research of Athens houses, churches and Oconee Hill Cemetery, she has compiled a vast collection of family records which undergird her understanding of how these families are interrelated, and she is generous in helping far-flung descendants gather data about their ancestors and kin. In 2008 the Georgia Genealogical Society recognized Charlotte for outstanding contributions to the field of genealogy.
In 2014 she published The Tangible Past in Athens, Georgia , a compilation of essays by twelve fellow lovers of Athens history and herself. It, like Oconee Hill Cemetery of Athens, Georgia , Volume I, won the Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation’s Publication of the Year Award and went on to receive the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Council’s 2015 Award for Excellence in Documenting Georgia’s History.
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