Edward Wills Watkins was born 25 September 1839 in Jackson County, Georgia to Robert H. and Margret Winters Watkins. Edward joined the Confederate States Army about 1862 and was a 2nd Lieutenant for Company D of the 6th Georgia Cavalry. Nine months after the Civil War ended, Edward married Georgia Butt in Union County, Georgia. The couple had at least six children, two of which died in infancy. The four to reach adulthood were Estelle Watkins Edwards (1870-1910); Edward Wills Watkins, Jr. (1876-1963); Emory Clifford Watkins (1881-1960); and Claude G. Watkins (1884-1927). Edward W. Watkins graduated from the Eclectic Medical Institute at Cincinnati, Ohio in 1867. According to the Lloyd Library & Museum -- Eclectic medicine was a branch of American medicine which made use of noninvasive therapies and healing practices popular in the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Eclectic medicine became a populist expansion of early American herbal medicine customs, such as those...
Telling the Tales of Tombstones