Family History

"We are all God's Children"
In 1834 John Bauskett a South Carolina plantation owner, purchased a slave by the name of Ruben, who had been born somewhere around mid 1820 in the Eastern Shore region.

John Bauskett owned thousands of acres, including a large plantation along the Savannah River near Hamburg, where Ruben was sent.

Ruben took the name Bauskett as his own, only because Bauskett was the first master Ruben knew, and in some way the name gave him an identity and a sense of family. Over the years the spelling of the name would change, until in the early twentieth century, Bauskett became Bosket.

In 1852 to raise capital for business ventures Bauskett sold his plantation along the Savannah River and moved to Columbia SC. Along with the land sales he also sold one to two hundred slaves included in the lot was Ruben.The purchaser was Francis W. Pickens who bought the plantation and one hundred slaves.

In the late 1840's Ruben was in his twenties, he courted a young women name Caroline Vaughn who also lived on the Savannah Plantation. They were married in the tradition of the times "step over the broom". Ruben and Caroline both worked in the fields. Their first child was Rosa. Aaron was born in 1848. Later there were three more sons Sicker, Tillman and William.
Because of their life situation as slaves, they would never live together as a family.

During the 1860s Pickens found he was in debt, and made the decision to sell some of his slaves to Alfred L. Dearing a plantation owner near Mount Willing, called Cane Break.

Aaron and Rosa were sold, They would never see their mother or father again, Aaron was 10 years old.

In 1896 the county of Saluda was carved out of Mount Willings and the northern part of Edgefield.

Life at Cane Break Plantation was hard, Aaron and Rosa were living with another slave family and they were not treated as part of the family.

In 1865 after the Civil War, Dearing urged his ex-slaves to stay and work the land since he no longer had a labor force. Aaron wanted to see what real freedom felt like; he left Cane Break Plantation to find work and enjoy his freedom.

Aaron soon found the promise of land and a mule was just that, a promise. Aaron made arrangement with a white planter in the Mount Willings area for work. He would work the land in exchange for a portion of the crop, thus was started a form of slavery, called Sharecropping system that would hold Aaron and other African Americans for years to come.

In the following years Aaron lived a hard life, moving from one planter to another, never really able to earn a living or buy the land he always wanted. In 1869 he moved to Columbia looking for work, not being successful he returned to Edgefield and became a sharecropper.

Around 1880 Aaron married a woman name Angeline,who was three years younger then him. It is not known if Angeline and Aaron had children, they eventually divorced.

Through these hard times Aaron remained a respectful and decent man. He became a deacon in his church, Pleasant Hill Baptist Church.
Aaron later married Christilda Mobley Pou from Pleasant Hill congregation. Tilda's father was a white man, her mother's overseer during slave times.

Christilda already had six children when she married Aaron. Together Christilda and Aaron had three more children Clifton "Pud",and Aaron. In 1892 Dandy was born in Edgefield County,South Carolina.

Dandy had five sisters; Lifey Jackson, Mamie Mobley, Carrie Robinson, Ollie Davis and Julie Simpkins; three brothers Aaron Bosket, Clifton Bosket and Matt Mobley.

Dandy married Ida Perry who was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1889 to Tom and Ida Smith Perry.

The Smith family was originally from Virginia. Ida was raised by her maternal grandparents, Tom & Ann Smith after the death of her mother. Ida's father remarried and had one daughter Rosie and three sons Luther, Willis and Ansles by his second wife.
Tom Perry migrated to Philadelphia, Pa.
Ida's mother had three brothers George, Will, Johnson and Tommy.

Dandy and Ida parented seventeen children, which included two sets of twins. They had twelve sons and five daughters.
Surviving are Tilda Bosket of Saluda South Carolina and Clyde Bosket of Allentown Pa.. Deceased are Robert, Tommy, Odies, Elise (Eddie), Doris, Lasket, Hayward, Swinney, Joe Nathan, Willie Jeff, June, Annie Dozier, Emmie and Ruby Abney.

Any inaccurate information contained here, is purely accidental; we welcome any information which would help in the telling of the Bosket History.

Some information was obtained from a book written by Fox Butterfield "ALL GOD'S CHILDREN" The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence

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