Union County

I am Rebecca Maloney, Webmistress and Coordinator for this Union County, Georgia. I hope you enjoy your visit. Please email me if you have any suggestions or contributions you would like to make.

Union County Was Established

 

Union County, located in northeast Georgia at the southern tip of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is the state’s eighty-third county and comprises 323 square miles. Its northern border is shared with North Carolina. In 1832 the state legislature created Union County from Cherokee County. John Thomas, a state representative for the area, suggested the name “Union.”

The western part of the county was annexed by Fannin County in 1854, and in 1856 the southern tip was given to Gilmer County and an eastern section went to Towns County. Most of the first white settlers of the area were Virginians who traveled to Georgia through the mountain passages of the Carolinas.

County Seat and Communities
The county seat is Blairsville, incorporated in 1835. The current courthouse, the county’s fourth, was built in 1978 as an annex to the Union County Office Building, which was built in 1976.

Research Resources

Make sure you check the "Research Resources" section! There are many resources to help your hunt of your family history.

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"The Chosen"

We are the chosen. In each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors. To put flesh on their bones and make them live again. To tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve. Doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before. We are the story tellers of the tribe. All tribes have one. We have been called, as it were, by our genes. Those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story. So, we do. In finding them, we somehow find ourselves. How many graves have I stood before now and cried? I have lost count. How many times have I told the ancestors, "You have a wonderful family; you would be proud of us.". How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for me? I cannot say. It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who I am, and why I do the things I do. It goes to seeing a cemetery about to be lost forever to weeds and indifference and saying - I can't let this happen. The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It goes to doing something about it. It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. How they contributed to what we are today. It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family. It goes to deep pride that the fathers fought and some died to make and keep us a nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. It is of equal pride and love that our mothers struggled to give us birth, without them we could not exist, and so we love each one, as far back as we can reach. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them. So we do. With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are they and they are the sum of who we are. So, as a scribe called, I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take my place in the long line of family storytellers. That is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and restore the memory or greet those who we had never known before."

by Della M. Cummings Wright; Rewritten by her granddaughter Dell Jo Ann McGinnis Johnson; Edited and Reworded by Tom Dunn, 1943."